Happenchance

By Rodney Gascoyne

1: Forbears:

I have the perhaps unusual perspective in not only knowing of  all my maternal great great grandparents but also having photographs of many of them and those that followed. The four sources are Macintosh, Sparshott, Marsden and Gascoyne.  All eight were born between 1821 and 1837 and married between 1849 and 1862.

Macintosh:

John Macintosh was born in Scotland at Auldearn, Nairnshire, near Inverness, in July 1821. His father was the manager on Blackhills Farm but John became orphaned at the age of 10 and received little education. He moved in with his married sister and worked as a farmhand until 1838 when they took advantage of a government scheme to help emigrant freemen settle in Australia. They sailed from Cromarty  on the "Asia" which eventually arrived in Sydney 10th May 1839 after an eight month voyage and delays from a leaky ship that almost sank in the Bay of Biscay in a storm. The ship returned to Plymouth for repairs before continuing the passage. On arrival they were housed in the Barracks for the limit of two weeks. Work was not easy to come by so they moved upcountry and John took what jobs he could get building fences or other casual labouring in the bush. After a year and a half of that he was lucky to work in a store in Maitland on the Paterson River, where most trade was conducted through barter. For the next six years he learned all he could of running the store, educating himself in the evenings and saved his money. 

He moved back to Sydney in 1846 and set up his own ironmonger and hardware store that survived long after his death. He did have one bad spell around 1850 when gold was discovered in Victoria and all his staff left to seek their fortune. He survived on his own with his wife's assistance till the miners returned disillusioned. Early on he had a monopoly on manufactured wire nails and he fostered sales of this new product by dropping a few into all his sales of iron nails so that people could try them. This together with other entrepreneurial talents allowed him to expand rapidly and set up other stores and to become a rich man in a new colony. He took on civic duties in 1861 when he was first elected to the City Council and later served as a magistrate. He promoted many sanitary improvements and was an advocate for the establishment of public parks and worker education. He was re-elected seven more times to the City and went on to be a representative for many years in the State Legislative Assembly before being appointed in 1881 to the Legislative Council, the New South Wales upper chamber, a post he held till his death. He was said to be a dour Scot, a teetotaler, hard working and strict Presbyterian.  

Caroline Alway was born in Sydney 1831 and was blind. Her father, William, born 1793, had been transported to Australia by Newbury assizes in England for petty theft. Having served his time, he stayed, found work and married a local girl, Mary Wall in 1829. 

John and Caroline married 10th May 1849 on the tenth anniversary of his arrival in Sydney. After living some years near Botany Bay, in 1870 they bought "Lindsay", a large house and grounds at the far end of Darling Point, with magnificent views overlooking Sydney harbour (the house still stands and is now owned by the National Trust of NSW). In 1880, John also bought land for a summer home in Burradoo, in the bush on the way to Canberra and close to the railway, calling it "Laurel Park", where he cleared the trees and brush and constructed a large verandah styled house (it remains largely unchanged and is still in private ownership). They raised eleven children although four of them died in early childhood.  Caroline died as a result of childbirth in early 1880 but he stayed living at Lindsay till his death.  After her death, the fourth daughter, Jessie took a large part in raising the younger children and keeping house for their father. (Years later I had the privilege to make the toast, at a family gathering of 120 members, at the Officers' Mess, North Head Garrison, Sydney, where we celebrated the 150th anniversary of John's landing in Australia.) John eventually died in 1911 after an accident involving one of his own horse drawn carts at the Pitt Street shop, that broke his hip.

("Lindsay" was sold after John died, changing hands a number of times over the next 50 years, before finally being donated to the National Trust, by which time the name had become Lindesay. Somewhere in that time much of the spare land was sold off for other homes and newer buildings, but little changed in the house and the harbour views were retained. John named his youngest son after the house and so our family still use its original spelling from those days.)  

Old newspaper articles about John Macintosh and a family biography.                                  Letters: John Macintosh Jnr. to his sister Jessie, and nephew, in England, 1911 & 1920s.     Macintosh Database of descendants of the Hon. John, mostly Australians.

Sparshott:

Charles Sparshott, born 1828, was from Worcester and eventually owned a large grocery store in the centre of the city. The business continued for many years but was sold in 1916 when it became necessary to divide  up his estate between the three surviving sons on his death, although his eldest son had, till then, worked with him in the business. He married Jane Alcock in 1860. The Alcocks were a family with a business in lace making with interests in Worcester and overseas, in Sydney, started when brothers Thomas and John Alcock sailed out in the winter of 1853/4. Charles' and Jane's first son, Charles George Sparshott was born in 1861 and at the age of 24 was sent to Australia to meet his mother's brothers in Sydney. He was to learn what he could of business in a stay of maybe six months, then return home to Worcester. (He was the first of a long line of English members visiting family in Australia, running through every generation right up to my own first visit in 1988. An earlier visit in the reverse direction, in 1864, was recorded by Thomas Alcock, the uncle, when he and his family travelled under sail around Cape Horn on "La Hogue" to visit England. Their exploits on the fast, 90 day non-stop voyage were recorded in a special diary - see Appendix A, they 'being seen off by brother John on the Steamtug'.)

As you might have guessed by now, the Alcocks were close neighbours of the Macintoshes, on Darling Point in Sydney and Charles stayed at his uncle's large home "Springfield", (all that is left now is a block of flats by that name, near to the church at the top end of the Point, close to the main Sydney road) within half a mile of "Lindsay". He and Jessie met and socialized at each other's houses and those of friends in the area and the two became attracted to each other. Jessie's father was not in favour as she was his housekeeper and oldest daughter still at home. He did not want her to leave and go with Charles. Unfortunately for him, his daughter was as strong minded as he. After Charles left to return to England, she made up her mind to elope and follow him. As she was under 21 she could not marry without her father's consent so she arranged for her older brother John to accompany her to England on the ship and stay over till she was 21 and could marry in her own right. This he did and after the marriage in 1887 he returned to Sydney. The first child of that marriage was Elsie, born in Worcester 1889 at their home "Cintra", named after one of the two smaller houses built in Lindsay's grounds in Sydney for the families of the elder children of The Honorable John Macintosh, as he became titled after his appointment to the Legislative Council of New South Wales in 1881. 

Family notes on Sparshott forbears.                                                                                          Gascoyne Database containing Sparshott and Gascoyne descendants.                                  Alcock Database showing descendants of Thomas Senior, mostly Australians.

Marsden:

Edwin Marsden, born 1836, married Louisa Bywater in 1853. The Marsdens, of Baslow and later Sheffield, England,  were a wealthy family with long lasting connections, fully recorded in a privately published book written by a family member in 1914, going back many centuries. That book records Edwin as an ivory merchant and cutter - a reference I believe to the traditional Sheffield business of fine steel cutlery, the best of which had ivory handles. Their daughter Kate was born in 1860 and 26 years later married George Gascoyne (II). This was seen by the family as beneath her and thus a bad marriage. The Marsdens were business people and the Gascoynes were considered trades people. A family photograph taken in 1891 when Kate and George (II) were leaving to relocate to Worcester, shows many Marsdens. The family were to be decimated by illness and then the Great War, from which not many seemed to emerge. Others died childless.

Gascoyne:

George Gascoyne (I), born 1837, married Mary Corbitt in 1862 in Sheffield, Yorkshire. By the late 1880's there was a large and well known stationary store in the city centre under the Gascoyne name, but who owned or started the business and when is not known. Searches for records have produced known or likely family members -  shepherd and butcher Edmund Gascoyne (1798-1879) married Mary (1799-1879), being George's parents, a William Gascoyne (1804) who was six years younger than Edmund - and coachman Samuel Corbitt (1800) who could have been Mary's father, according to his age. There was also a record for a Jane Gascoyne, a sister born one year after George and may have been the Mrs. Aldred at his funeral. Edmund Snr., from Hougham, Lincolnshire, had ten children in all, George being 7th. An older son Edmund Jun. (1831-1880) married and had five sons, similar ages to George (I), who late in life was listed as an estate agent and collector.

George (I) died in 1888 but for some reason his son George (II), born 1865, maybe the only son or child, soon chose to relocate to Worcester in the Midlands. Nothing is known of what happened to the stationery store after 1891, perhaps George (II) sold it to take up a more 'proper' occupation. In Worcester he worked first as a clerk to a hop and seed merchant where he learned the trade and business. He was very successful as a manager and, with a loan from his father-in-law, eventually set up his own firm and later bought out many of the other merchants in the same business in Worcester and became the largest  such wholesaler in the region. Basically the company would buy seeds and hops from farmers and then dry, clean and bag them for eventual sale, with certified seed germination quality, to either the brewers or farmers for their future crops.

He amassed much wealth and bought a large villa styled house, "Lindisfarne" in the City. He was also one of the first people in Worcester to purchase a new invention - the motor car. Kate retained or reawakened her high born tastes and so they also purchased a villa at Roquebrune, a small village near Menton, on the French Riviera overlooking Monte Carlo and the Mediterranean. They would visit in the winters and Kate stayed longer, or visited alone. Although the villa was sold after George's death in 1930, Kate lived in "Lindisfarne" until her death in 1950. 

Their eldest son was also named George (III), born 1887, and it was he who took over running the family business. He controlled the company although his brothers and sister also owned shares. The other two sons had no lasting, active  interest in the firm. George (III) met Elsie Sparshott after an introduction from his sister, who had attended the same finishing school in Belgium, after they returning to Worcester. They married just before the Great War in 1913 and he soon left with his horse artillery regiment to join in the fight (he continued as a reserves Major after the war and during WW2). Their eldest son was George (IV) too, continuing a long tradition, but this ended June 1942 when he was killed over Germany as an RAF navigator/air gunner in the first 1,000 bomber raid. Oddly, after joining up early in the war, he had completed his required number of  missions and was made an instructor; he taught air crew for some time and was awarded the DFM, but was then called back to active duty for the first giant raid, when all available aircraft and airmen were pressed into service. His brother Patrick was killed, in February 1945, following in his footsteps into the RAF, motivated to join up after his brother's death, having previously been in a protected profession, working on a farm. The only other son, David, died at the age of four, some years before that War began. There were two daughters of the marriage.

Gascoyne Family history article, the Worcester Evening News,  25th May, 2002.

See Appendix B for some thumbnails of family pictures. (Can be expanded for fuller size images.) See Appendix C for a full listing of dates of known family over the last 250 years. More numerous Australian descendants of the Honourable John Macintosh and Thomas Alcock are also recorded, and linked above, in separate databases created by a number of family members worldwide. Much has been collected and tabulated, and even recently extended through connections made after this data appeared on the Internet. We hope it grows more from as yet unknown sources.

Quick Memoir Summary: I have been writing snippets for an online magazine for some while, relating many of the tales and accounts from this memoir. Recently, the Editor asked me to write a short account of myself for the readers. This was published May 2005:

SPOTLIGHT

This month falls on Rodney Gascoyne, who hails from Toronto, and who pens Rodney's Ramblings in Bonzer! each month.

Rodney writes: 'As the Chinese curse goes, 'may you live in interesting times'— I think that I may have been lucky to have done just that. I say lucky because I don't accept the curse part of the saying.

'I was lucky to be raised in a family during hard times and with few excesses around. The conditions of WW2, the constant bombing of London and food rationing into the 50s gave us a meager start. But those very circumstances trained me to make the most of whatever came my way and encouraged the use of all the imagination I could muster. Given modern demands, fashions and financial temptations, we had it much easier. We had nothing or very little, and expecting more would have been fruitless. In that sense, our options were simple and our choices frugal.

'My grandfather provided funds to send my brother and me to boarding school in the country, and this provided a happy and contented childhood, also in sparse surroundings. More of the same I suppose. Close to the end of my time, I was well enough honed to know I needed to take charge of my own life. This led to a few years of meandering hopes and plans, initially as a banker for emerging Commonwealth countries. This proved a false start because of "Africanisation".

'My next move was pure luck and escapism. An ad in the personal columns of the London Times was seeking youngsters interesting in joining the seagoing purser's staff of the Union-Castle Line. I wanted to travel and this provided an excellent means for three years. It was the end of an era, a tradition of seafaring that would soon disappear, but I wanted to witness what of this I could. Our ocean liners went all around Africa and our cruise ship sailed the Mediterranean, Atlantic islands and the Baltic. Eventually, the routine of such an idyllic situation became apparent and reminded me to find a true vocation and start a proper career ashore. As if from nowhere, I suddenly realized this should be the accountancy profession, as an excellent business training that allowed the greatest latitude of choices. The five years since school had matured me and suddenly I knew I had found a purpose and goal in life.

'Later I found a number of tangents I could take after my articles and qualification. I worked in Industry and after some community work, returned to the profession, by then finding a specialism in Computer Auditing. This had taken me to Canada, a great choice. I find myself more at home here than any other corner of the world. I even worked in Australia for some months, to fully explore a continent with which I have family connections and has fascinated me on other visits.

'I was emboldened to set up my own audit consultancy business, in Toronto, and have since followed other tangents involving subjects and research that interested me. By now my family had grown up and my marriage ended, allowing me latitude to follow ideas without risking the security of others. This also permitted me to travel worldwide to the more obvious, and a few less known, tourist spots, often off season and on breaks I could allow myself from work.

'Here I am at the start of a new century, still following unusual or new ideas on where my profession should be going and tilting at the odd windmills. Writing a column for a Canadian national accounting magazine and others, over six years during a frenetic period of change and advances in computerization, let alone audit automation and the growth of governance issues, certainly put my lance to good work against many real or imaginary targets.

'As I write this, I am visiting my daughter and grandson for Easter, in their home, two thousand miles west, appreciating that my opportunities and luck would be something they have little chance of emulating. I have lived in what now seems like an innocent age, when we expected to have the world at our feet and to have endless options. I only wish their environment, safety and economic prospects were anything like that I was lucky enough to grow up with. I wish them well and all the luck there is but wonder whether I would truly want to change places with either of them.'