Rachel Patience Lawson Whitley
Rachel was the mother of Alexander “Sandy” Albion, my great-grandfather, and so my great-great-grandmother. She was born in Ireland and may have lived her early years in comparative comfort for the times. Her later life was more challenging. This is her story so far as I have been able to piece it together. Numbers in parentheses refer to sources which are listed at the foot of this document, mostly with links to pages in Trove where interested readers can find more detail.
I have been unable to find a birth record for Rachel and the records I was able to find seem confused in parts. The 1849 marriage record (1) notes “Full age”, implying 21 or older and birth in 1828 or earlier. The 1856 record of arrival in Sydney (3) has her age as 21 implying birth in 1835. Another record has age 43 in 1874, but the record of her second marriage in 1871 gives her age as 31 (implying a birth year 1840 and age of 9 or 10 at her first marriage). She is recorded as 77 at her death in 1908 (36), implying a birth year of 1831 although a couple of pieces published in 1908 (32, 34) describe her as a nonagenarian but that seems unlikely. The best estimate for birth year is probably 1831 making her just 18 when she married in 1849 and possibly misrepresenting her age to facilitate a marriage with which her parents were displeased.
Rachel married Alexander Albin, a carpenter from Portadown, County Armagh on 20 September 1849 in Kilmore parish church. Her residence is recorded as nearby Drumnahunshin. Her father is written first as Lawson Whitty and above that as Lawson Whitley, a farmer. Their first son, Lawson, was born on 25 March 1853 and baptised at St Marks church in Portadown on 10 April 1853 (2). He died sometime in 1853. Their second son, Hugh, was born sometime in 1855 and accompanied them to Sydney where his age was recorded as one when Alexander, Rachel, and Hugh arrived in Sydney aboard the Cressy on 15 January 1856 (3). As Rachel told it shortly before her death in 1908,
My husband ran away with me when I was only small. I was a disgrace to the family, so I had to get away somewhere out of the road of my people. They are the heads of Ireland, and are a very ancient family. My husband and I decided upon coming out to New South Wales, and something over 50 years ago we were landed here by the ship Cressy”(33).
A third son, Alexander (later known as Sandy), was born on 16 February 1857 (4). Mum and Dad had requested a search of NSW birth records in 1990 and received a response that a record for George had been found but none for Alexander. In my searching I stumbled across an online forum discussing the ‘Alexander Albions’ that mentioned Alexander Abbin, born to Alexander and Rachel in 1857. I was able to find it in the NSW records where the name must have been misread. Some sources give the location of Alexander’s birth as Kingston, possibly because the family had an association with that part of Newtown in Sydney where Alexander is listed among other names in an 1860 newspaper notice about purchasers in arrears (5).
Things must have begun to fall apart for Rachel and Alexander around that time. In February 1859 Alexander placed a notice in the Sydney Morning Herald advising that Rachel had left and that he would “not be answerable for any debts she [might] contract.” (6) Rachel must have been pregnant at the time and George was born at Toongabbie on 3 September 1859 (7).
The next trace of Rachel is in a Sydney Morning Herald court report on 16 July 1864 (8). She had been assaulted by a man she was living with. He had broken up George’s barrow and hit her with a piece of it. Her injuries were serious and his sentence was £20 or 6 months imprisonment.
Thereafter, Rachel appears periodically in newspaper reports, mostly as a defendant for a variety of offences. In June 1865 she and another woman were convicted for prostitution and imprisoned for 7 days (9). In December 1865 she appeared for stealing a ring and 23s but was discharged when the prosecutors did not appear (10). In January 1866 she was fined 10s for using indecent words in a public place (11).
In April 1868 Rachel appeared as a witness when the man she was living with and supporting by prostitution was charged with assaulting George (12). The man had literally thrown George out of the house, down four or five steps, onto the street causing injuries. He was found guilty of aggravated assault with a penalty of £20 or 6 months in prison.
May 1868 found Rachel in court charged with indecent behaviour (13). She and another woman had accosted a man in Hyde Park. The penalty was 20s or 7 days. A month later she was back (14), charged together with two other women, with “being drunk and disorderly, and riotous about the streets.” In November of that year she appeared on a charge of assault (15).
Anne de Martini, of Pitt-street, deposed that defendant (a woman on the town) rents a room in her house; yesterday she was about to go out, and she (witness) believing that if she did go out, being very much the worse for liquor, she would certainly get into some kind of trouble, persuaded her not to go, and led her back to her own room; the defendant took up a tomahawk (produced), and declaring that she would cut down any one who would go into her room, forthwith attacked her (witness), and struck her three blows with the implement named; one blow on the forehead was very severe, and caused a wound from which a considerable flow of blood took place. To pay a penalty of £20, or to be imprisoned six months.
By June 1869 Rachel had moved to Maitland and, it appears, so had Ms de Martini. Rachel was charged with assault on a child (16).
At the West Maitland police court, yesterday, Rachel Albion was charged with violently assaulting a child, aged nine years, named Sarah Maria de Martini. The parties, it appeared, who are concerned in this affair, are residents together of the same house in the Horse Shoe Bend. On Thursday last, according to the evidence of Mrs. Martini, she and the prisoner had been drinking, when a quarrel arose, and prisoner ” took up stones, and stoned the whole of them out of the house.” Among the missiles thrown was a half brick, which struck the child on the head, inflicting a cut about an inch and a half long, which bled rather freely, causing the child’s pinafore to be covered with blood. The wound, however, was not deep, and when the child appeared in court seemed to be almost healed.-The prisoner, in defence, denied altogether that she had thrown stones, but averred that the little girl had scratched her (prisoner’s) little boy in the face, and that the boy had thrown the stone. The bench found the prisoner guilty, and adjudged her to pay a fine of 20s., or in default to be imprisoned for seven days.
That appears to be the first time that ‘Albion’ was recorded as her surname. In July of 1869 she was convicted of “drunkenness and disorderly conduct” with a penalty of 10s or 7 days (17). A month later, George was removed to Vernon Industrial School (a ship moored in Sydney that had been converted and used as a reform ‘school’). The justification recorded on the admission page was that he was “residing with his mother, a common prostitute, in West Maitland” (18).
Rachel must have remained in or near West Maitland for a few years. On 4 January 1871 she remarried as ‘Rachel Albin’ in St Paul’s Church, West Maitland (19), where her age was recorded as 31 and her status as widow – both inaccurate. The groom was recorded as John McMeny, a 34 year old shepherd born at Duncree. To date my searching has found no other trace of him but perhaps his name was incorrectly recorded. Both parties recorded their place of residence as Branxton, a township between Maitland and Singleton.
Sometime in 1874 Rachel was back in Sydney and recorded on the Darlinghurst gaol register as aged 43 (20). In January of 1875 she appeared in court (21):
Rachel Albion, not unknown to the police, for being drunk and disorderly in Clarence-street, was fined 20s, or seven days.
She was back to court in February to be imprisoned for a month as an habitual drunkard (22) and in April for public use of obscene language (23). In May 1875 she was involved in an incident where she claimed to have been robbed by a man while going to pay a bill at 1 am (24). When the case went to court a jury found him not guilty.
A few days later Rachel was back in court (25). On this occasion it seems she may have tried unsuccessfully to use the name switch from Albin to Albion to avoid conviction but it did not work:
Rachel Albion was charged with being an idle and disorderly person, having neither fixed abode nor lawful means of support. Constable Barry, in answer to the Bench, said that she was well known and had been frequently convicted of sundry offences at this court. She said that she had never been convicted of vagrancy, whereupon the Police Magistrate ordered the record book to be searched. It appeared therefrom that a Rachel Albin had been twenty times before this court within the last eighteen months for drunkenness or for disorderly conduct, and had been once convicted as an habitual drunkard on which charge she received sentence of one month’s imprisonment. To be imprisoned six months.
In December 1875 the NSW Police Gazette recorded her discharge (26). She next appears in the newspaper in September 1881 when she and another woman were charged with being “idle and disorderly persons” without “lawful means of support” and sentenced to two months (27). Presumably for other matters that I have not located, she is recorded being discharged from gaol in May 1882 (28) and March 1883 (29). In July 1883 she was sentenced to three months with hard labour for “having no visible means of support” (30).
I have so far found no trace of Rachel from July 1883 until March 1908 at which point news of her spread far and wide across Australia (31-35). The Evening News reported that Rachel was “an inmate of the Coast Hospital…suffering from a heart trouble” when she received news of a large inheritance from Ireland (31). The story included mention of her Irish family, arrival in Sydney aboard Cressy, and that George had not known of her origins or whereabouts until very recently. The Australian Star reported that the inheritance was £250 000 along with details of how a lawyer had arrived at the hospital so she could make a will in favour of George (32). The story appeared in many regional newspapers, including the Darling Downs Gazette (33), which offered an expanded version that ran to 700 words and is too long to include here but worth reading on Trove for those interested. When the story appeared in the ‘Sydney Letter’ of the Melbourne weekly, Table Talk (34), Mrs Anglin was reported as 90 years of age and there was an interesting gloss that I hope might explain Rachel’s disappearance from the newspapers after 1883:
The youngest daughter of an aristocratic old Irish family, a run-away match with a ne’er-do-well, loss of fortune, and emigration to Australia, then the going through of all the ups and downs usual in such cases. Mrs. Anglin then took a position as cook in Lady Allen’s family, in the days when the Allens flourished in all their wealth and magnificence, at “Toxteth,” Glebe Point. In her maiden days the newly-found heiress was Miss Rachael Lawson Whitley, of “Whitley Hall,” County Kilmore, Armagh, She has come too late into her kingdom to enjoy it, but she is proud of having two sons to inherit after her.
It was left to The World’s News (35), a week or so after the news broke, to pour cold water on the story and publish the only known photograph of Rachel. It reported that a letter to Rachael Alban had initially been returned to its Irish sender but that Rachel’s niece, Margaret Logan, persisted and the police eventually located Rachel and delivered the letter. The paper reported that Rachel was “seized with the idea” of an inheritance but that their inquiries found that was just her fancy:
There was not a word about money in the letter, said the Inspector of Police, under whose immediate notice the document came, and one cannot see how it can be construed into indicating that there was a shilling in question. The letter was merely of the ordinary friendly character.
Rachel died on 7 April 1908 at the Coast Hospital, Little Bay and was buried in Rookwood Cemetery on 8 April 1908 (36).
I cannot condone much of Rachel’s recorded behaviour but I can understand that life would have been difficult for a woman on her own at the time. I hope that her disappearance from the public record between 1883 and 1980 may have been because she managed to find suitable employment as suggested by Table Talk (34). Given such a chance earlier she may have avoided her frequent encounters with the law. Certainly she appears to have been well regarded by those who cared for her in her latter years. According to the Darling Downs Gazette (33), “The nurses at the Coast Hospital speak in the most affectionate terms of their patient, and refer to her as a ‘dear old body.'” I think I would have liked my great-great-grandmother Rachel. She appears to have been a resilient survivor who would fit well with the succession of strong women in our family.