Station Street in Berwick becomes Gloucester Avenue

Station Street in Berwick was changed to Gloucester Avenue after the visit of the Duke of Gloucester (1900 - 1974) to Victoria in 1934 for Victoria’s centenary. The celebrations were held between October 1934 and June 1935; the Centenary firstly commemorated Edward Henty's Portland settlement in November 1834 as Victoria's founding, then John Batman's pronouncement of Port Phillip as 'the place for a village', and thus the city's foundation, in June 1835.

The Duke of Gloucester in 1934. 

Photographer: Raphael Tuck & Sons, London.

State Library of Victoria Image H10577

The Duke of Gloucester was the brother of Edward VIII - the Duke of Windsor - and George VI, who is the Queen's father. In 1935 he married Lady Alice Christabel Montagu-Douglas-Scott (1901 - 2004, she was 102 when she died), daughter of the 7th Duke of Buccleuch. They had two children- Prince William (1941-1972) and Prince Richard (1944-), who is the current Duke of Gloucester.

The Duke arrived in Victoria on the H.M.S Sussex on October 18 and departed November 19, 1934. He travelled all over Victoria and called in on Berwick on  October 27. The original plan was for the Duke to attend the Berwick Show which was scheduled for that day, he would arrive at 5.20pm on the train, after having visited Yallourn. The Duke would be gracefully welcomed  (1) and he would view the exhibit of prize winning horses and cattle (2).

However, things did not go to plan as the show had to be postponed due to excessive flooding (3) of the grounds and the Duke was instead welcomed at the Railway Station. The Dandenong Journal reported on the occasion -
A large gathering assembled on Saturday at the Berwick railway station, to take part in the welcome to H.R.H. the Duke of Gloucester. The committee of the Agricultural Society, under the leadership of the president (Cr. D. N. McBride), who was ably assisted by Mr. C. F. Greaves, past president, and Mr. W. Gamble, parade superintendent; had made complete arrangements, and a suitable area adjoining the station ground had been allotted for various bodies, including shire councillors
from Berwick, Dandenong, Cranbourne and Ferntree Gully, Justices of the Peace, Returned Soldiers, Girl Guides, Boy Scouts, St. Margaret’s Girls’ School, Berwick, and all State schools within a radius of 10 miles.

Early visitors began to arrive, and prior to the arrival of the Royal train several hundred people were in waiting. The rain had ceased, and the sun shone brightly. The train, drawn by two engines, steamed in on time at 5.20, the Royal visitor immediately stepped out on to the platform, where he was received by the president of the Agricultural Society (Cr. D. N. McBride), and escorted into the Royal enclosure. Cr. McBride then conveyed the thanks of the Berwick Agricultural Society to H.R.H. for the honor conferred upon the society and the district for the Royal visit, and for the acceptance by the Duke of an honorary life membership of the society. He also assured the Royal visitor of the loyalty of all to His Majesty the King.

Cr. McBride then presented the President of the Berwick Shire (Cr. Kinsella) to His Royal Highness, who expressed the people’s loyalty to Throne and appreciation of the honor conferred by the Royal visitor, which were such as to cement the bonds of Empire. That welcome, his Royal Highness acknowledged, and expressed his pleasure at visiting Berwick.

Before departing the Duke was shown a wombat. He was delighted, and when he took his departure, amid great enthusiasm, all were delighted at the success which had attended his reception. (Dandenong Journal, November 1, 1934, see here)

Caption from The Age - At Berwick a small dog joined in the welcome to the Duke just as he began his inspection of the guard of honor of Girl Guides.

The Age October 29, 1936 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/205883088?#

There was a less reverent account of the Duke's visit in Labour Call or to give its full title The Labor Call: the official organ of the Political Labor Council of Victoria. The head line was

GOR SAVE UP-TO-DATE

PLAYED EVERYWHERE WITH DIGNITY AND COLOR.

EVEN THE KOOKABURRAS ARE WHISTLING IT AT BERWICK.

Naturally, the National Anthem was the tune most heard on this tour. It has been played with the dignity and the color of the Grenadier Guards; it has been played melodiously, off the key, fast time and slow time. At Berwick it was played on a gramophone which was in a car and amplified through a box attached to a tree. This was the most unique representation of the anthem heard on the tour. Berwick's was a pretty welcome. In a rich paddock just outside the station an area was roped off. Some hundreds of people assembled outside the ropes, and beyond them were a score of girls on ponies. The crowd cheered when the Duke accepted life membership of the Berwick Agricultural Society. Founded in 1848, the society is the oldest in the State. The Duke is the eleventh life member.
A tame wombat was on exhibition here in a cage. (Labour Call November 8, 1934, see here)

At the Berwick Shire Council meeting held on August 21, 1936 a petition was presented asking that Station Street be renamed Gloucester Avenue as a memento of the Duke's visit. The Council agreed.

Dandenong Journal August 27, 1936

https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/214740768?

The Duke of Gloucester was the Governor General of Australia from January 1945 to January 1947 and visited Berwick privately during that time (4). He was invited to the 1945 Berwick Show, but was unable to attend but sent a message that  he well remembers his previous visit to Berwick in 1934, which he enjoyed very much (5).

Trove list - I have created a short list of  articles on Trove connected to the visit of the Duke of Gloucester to Berwick, access it here.

Sources 
(1) Dandenong Journal October 25, 1934, see here.
(2) Dandenong Journal October 25, 1934, see here.
(3) Dandenong Journal  November 1, 1934, see here.
(4) Early Days of Berwick, 3rd edition, pages 63 and 64.
(5) Dandenong Journal November 21, 1945, see here.

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Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee

Queen Elizabeth celebrates her Diamond Jubilee this year and the main block of celebratory activities takes place  from June 2 to June 5. If you happen to be in England you could attend these events - check out the following websites.The official Royal Family website can be found at  http://www.royal.gov.uk  and the official Jubilee website is at http://www.thediamondjubilee.org/  

Casey Cardinia has various links to the Monarchy. Firstly, Lord Casey after whom the City of Casey was named, lived in Berwick and was the Governor General of Australia from September 1965 until April 1969. The Governor General is appointed by the Monarch and is the Monarch's representative in Australia. Secondly, some of our roads have a Royal connection -  the Princes Highway was originally known as the Gippsland Road but changed in 1920 after the visit of Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII, then the Duke of Windsor). Station Street in Berwick was changed to Gloucester Avenue after the visit of the Duke of Gloucester to Victoria in 1934. Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh and son of Queen Victoria, visited Beaconsfield in 1869 and stayed at the Gippsland Hotel. John and Margaret Doveton, who gave their name to Doveton are said to have been descended from Edward 1 and his wife Eleanor of Castille.

 

The Queen and Prince Phillip came to Australia in 1954, they arrived on February 3 in Sydney and left on April 1 from Fremantle. Whilst they were here they visited every state and many country towns. On March 3 the Royal couple were in Gippsland, they flew to Sale for  a reception, then went by the Royal Train to Traralgon for a reception, by car to Yallourn to see the open-cut coal mine, then they drove to Warragul for a reception and then took the Royal Train back to Melbourne.  Many towns along the way decorated their shop fronts including Berwick. These photographs, of High Street Berwick,  are from our Archive and show how Berwick celebrated the 1954 visit by the Queen.The photographs were donated by Mrs Julie Berry (nee Halleur)

If anyone knows the name of this gentleman, then I would love to know. He is presumably the Local Real Estate, replacing his sign with a banner.

My family actually has a connection to this Royal visit. My father, Frank Rouse, was doing his National Service at the time and they had to put in a certain amount of hours and one of his duties was being a Guard of Honour, along the route. Dad and his colleagues, spent about seven hours standing at their designated spot (in his case on the outskirts of Warragul) and the Royal motorcade apparently passed by in a second. He has his gun, but no bullets, however, he can (and does) say that he successfully guarded the Queen! 40,000 people were  in Warragul on the day of the Queen’s visit. 

In honour of the Diamond Jubilee, the Queen has made available the diaries of her great, great grandmother, Queen Victoria.  Queen Victoria also celebrated a Diamond Jubilee and this why they have been released at this time. The journals have been digitised, so you can  see Queen Victoria's own hand writing and also the illustrations she interspersed amongst the text. This one is a self portrait from August 21, 1850. These journals are  a great historical resource and even if you are not especially interested in the content, then this represents a great example of how history meets technology - not only can you read the diaries, you can follow Queen Victoria's thoughts on Twitter and you can 'like' her on Facebook. The journals can be found at http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org

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Beaconsfield and the Royal Connection

One of the things that I love best about history are the connections that pop up between people and places and events. I do love a Royal connection so that's why I was happy to find out that the Dovetons (after whom Doveton was named) are both descendants of King Edward 1 (1239-1307) and his wife Eleanor of Castille (1241-1290) and now I am going to tell you about Beaconsfield and it's Royal connection.

In 1855, David and Janet Bowman who held the lease on the Panty Gurn Gurn Station, were granted a licence for the Gippsland Hotel, near the Cardinia Creek on the Gippsland Road. It was known as the Gippsland Hotel as the Cardinia Creek was the border of the Port Phillip district and the Gippsland district. David Bowman died in 1860 aged 54 and Janet Bowman continued running the Hotel and put it up for sale in May 1866.

An Advertisment for the Gippsland Hotel
The Argus, June 6, 1866  http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5764495

It was still for sale a year later but by 1869 the Souter family were the licensees. In that same year, Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh (1844 - 1900)  stayed at the hotel for several days. The Prince had taken over the Inn and staffed it with members of his ship, the H.M.S Galatea. The Government had built and furnished two extra rooms to accommodate the Prince. These rooms were made of brick, with a slate roof as opposed to the rest of the Inn which was of wattle and daub. Prince Alfred, was the second son of Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert and he had the distinction of undertaking the first ever Royal tour to Australia from October 1867 to June 1868. During this time, he was seriously wounded by an Irishman, Henry James O’Farrell (who was hung for the crime) at a picnic in Sydney in March 1868. However he recovered and made a private visit to Australia from January to April 1869 and it was during this time he visited Beaconsfield. In 1874, he married the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia, the daughter Tsar Alexander II and in honour of this marriage, an English bakery made the Marie biscuit, with her name imprinted on it. So next time you eat a Marie biscuit or use them to make chocolate hedgehog or lemon slice, remember the Grand Duchess and her husband, Prince Alfred.

Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, stayed at the Gippsland Hotel

Getting back to Mrs Bowman, who was described as enterprising, courageous and a devout Presbyterian, in 1861-62 she paid to have a 50 mile track cut from her Hotel to the Hughes Track which went to to the Jordan Goldfields (around Wood's Point). The track was said to have cost £1500. Some said that Mrs Bowman cut the track so miners would go past her door however she maintained that she did it because the Government had announced that it would compensate people who provided tracks to the Goldfields. After much fighting, in 1878, the Government awarded her £300 (or £500 depending on sources) as compensation. Janet Bowman died in 1904 aged 93 having outlived six of her eight children. Bowman's Hotel, later called Souter's Hotel is now known as the Central Hotel. The current Mediterranean style building was in 1928.

The Gippsland Hotel, 1860. 

This illustration comes from the book The Early Days of Berwick.

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John Doveton and Margaret Doveton - Part 2

In our last post we looked at the life of Captain John Doveton and in this post we will see what we can find out about his wife, Margaret. She was born a Doveton and married a Doveton and I feel that this means that the suburb of Doveton was really named for her as well as her husband. As we found out in the last post, I knew Margaret's parents names from her marriage certificate, i.e Francis Crossman Doveton and Margaret Bostock. I also knew she was born in Tasmania. The Tasmanian Indexes to Births, Deaths and Marriage (BDM), on CD-Rom, are available to use at Narre Warre, Cranbourne and Pakenham Libraries. A quick search revealed her parents married in 1842, that Margaret was born in Hobart in 1844 and that her sister, Rachel Emily, was born Campbell Town in 1846. That was all I could find, so I ‘googled’ Francis Crossman Doveton and according to some information on the Ballarat & District Genealogical Society website http://www.ballaratgenealogy.org.au/ Francis Crossman Doveton was the first Gold Commissioner at Ballarat, but I will tell you more about that later.

Now I knew that the family had moved to Victoria I looked up the Victorian Indexes to the BDMs and found that the next two children, Annie (born 1848) and Francis (1850) were born at Port Fairy and the last child John (1852) was born near Warrnambool. Margaret Bostock, had been born in 1824 in Tasmania and died in Victoria in 1853. After her death, Francis Crossman Doveton married Mary Ann Snell in 1855 and had eight other children. So already we have found out some personal information about our Margaret, including the sad fact that her own mother died when she was nine.

Francis Crossman Doveton had come to Australia with the 51st Regiment of Foot (2nd Yorkshire, West Riding Regiment). The Regiment arrived in 1838 and served in Tasmania and Western Australia and then left for Bengal in 1846, but Doveton remained in Australia. This same information is mentioned in the report of his death in The Argus of July 15, 1905. As Francis Doveton Crossman had a Government position in Victoria, I checked the Victorian Government Gazette, where all official appointments are announced, and found his first appointment as Commissioner of Crown Lands (reproduced below).

Victorian Government Gazette, Wednesday, August 27, 1851, page 312.

The Victorian Government Gazettes have been digitised from 1836 to 1997 and can be searched on the State Library of Victoria website, www.slv.vic.gov
According to the Victorian Government Gazette other appointments followed, amongst which were - in 1852 he was appointed a Magistrate of the Colony of Victoria, in 1855 Chairman of the Local Court of the District of Hepburn and in 1858 he was appointed a Warden of the Gold Fields, then a Chinese Protector and in 1860 he was appointed as a Coroner, acting at Daylesford. From The Argus I found out that in 1866 he was declared Insolvent in the Supreme Court, due to ‘want of employment and having accepted accommodation bills for others’. His liabilities were £2,233 pounds and his assets £206.

The Argus, Monday, November 17, 1941, page 6. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article8217085

As we found out in the first post, we know when Margaret was married (1873) and we know that she purchased the property at Doveton in her own name in December 1894. We also know that by 1900 the property was leased and they were living in Oakleigh. According to the Australian Electoral Rolls on Ancestry database, in 1909 Margaret was still at Atherton Road in Oakleigh, but in 1914 she had moved to Malvern East. In 1924, she was at Everdon, Rose Street in Surrey Hills and was still there in 1937. In 1941 she was living in Mordialloc. I looked up The Argus newspaper on the National Library of Australia's Australian Newspapers website and came across the interesting article, reproduced above, from the November 17, 1941 edition. Some of the same information was recorded in her Obituary in The Argus of December 16, 1941. The Obituary is reproduced below. The Obituary mentions she was buried at the St Kilda Cemetery, not Oakleigh, where her husband was buried.

The Argus, Tuesday, December 16 1941, page 3. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article822687

We know that John and Margaret were cousins, but I wanted to know how they were related. There are numerous Doveton Family histories on the Internet and one site lists the children of John Frederick Doveton and Elizabeth Crossman. The children include a John Bazett Doveton (born 1807) and a Frederick Crossman Doveton (born 1817). But, ever suspicious of ‘unofficial information’ on the Internet I wanted to confirm this with other sources. Now, in the last post we know the Captain John Doveton’s father was John Bazette Doveton. We know that John Bazette Doveton was born around 1807 and from the Oxford University Alumni 1500-1886 database on Ancestry, we know that his father was John Frederick Doveton, so that fits. We also know, from the Victorian Indexes to the Births, Deaths and Marriages that Francis Crossman Doveton was 87 when he died in 1905, which makes him born around 1817 and that his parents are listed as Frederick Doveton and Elizabeth Crossman. Francis is also listed as a past pupil of the King’s School at Bruton (a facimile copy of the School Register 1826 to 1890 has been digitized by Google Books) and his father is listed as the Reverend John Frederick Doveton. This gives us a few other sources which confirm that John Bazett Doveton and Francis Crossman Doveton are brothers, being sons of John Francis Doveton, and therefore John and Margaret are first cousins.

Two more interesting facts about the Doveton family. They have a connection to Everdon Hall in Little Everdon. It is a Grade 2 Listed building built around 1820 for General Doveton and interestingly, Everdon was also the name Margaret Doveton gave to her house in Rose Street in Surrey Hills. Secondly, the article on the Ballarat & District Genealogical Society website on Francis Crossman Doveton (full details at the bottom) states that Elizabeth Crossman, John and Margaret’s grandmother, is said to be a direct descendant of King Edward 1 (1239-1307) and his wife Eleanor of Castille (1241-1290). They married in 1254 and had sixteen children, with only six living to adulthood. The Royal couple were on a trip to Lincoln when Eleanor fell ill and died. A memorial cross was erected at every place where the entourage stopped, when her body was being transported back to London. These crosses are known as the Eleanor Crosses. Eleanor was buried in Westminister Abbey. If your family has been in the United Kingdom for many generations it is apparently more common than you would expect to be related to a member of the Royal Family, albeit very distantly, as is the case with John and Margaret Doveton, so the Royal connection is quite plausible. Anyway, it is a very romantic story and I really like the Royal connection to Doveton.

The effigy of Eleanor of Castille (1241-1290) at Westminister Abbey. Eleanor is said to be an ancestor of both John Doveton and Margaret Doveton.

All the sources I have used to find out this information on John and Margaret Doveton are freely available, with the exception of the Death and Marriage Certificates which I purchased. You can access the United Kingdom Census collection, the Australian Electoral Rolls and the Oxford University Alumni on Ancestry database, available at all our Libraries. The Victorian Government Gazette is accessed through the State Library of Victoria website. The old newspapers, the Australian Newspapers Project, can be accessed on the National Library of Australia website. You can use the Internet at all our Libraries and it is free with fast down-load times. The Indexes to the Births, Deaths and Marriages, from all the States of Australia, are available at Narre Warren, Cranbourne and Pakenham Libraries, as are the old Shire of Berwick and Shire of Cranbourne Rate Records. This means, you could well find out some of the same sort of information on one of your Ancestors as I have discovered on the Dovetons. In finishing, I can safely conclude that Captain John Doveton and Margaret Elizabeth Doveton were first cousins, as their fathers were brothers, in which case Margaret should have as much status as the ‘namesake’ of the suburb of Doveton as her husband.

*Francis Doveton, First Gold Commissioner at Ballarat by Thelma Birrell. http://www.ballaratgenealogy.org.au/art/doveton.htm

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