A FAMILY AFFAIR — OR, WHAT BECAME OF FRED?

Press, Issue 33845, 17 May 1975, Page 12

A FAMILY AFFAIR — OR, WHAT BECAME OF FRED?

Between the years 1846 and 1860 seven sons of John Beauchamp and Ann Stone left England for Australia,

In those land-hungry times many large Victorian families made this tremendous decision. Generally it was a parental decision and the children came willy-nilly; but the Beauchamp boys seem to have left a lively and happy home.

They had a good education and their five aunts (who, with Ann, made up the ‘Six Precious Stones’) had married well, into the professions, the arts and the business circles of London City — then the commercial centre of the world. There is one clue to this lemming-like urge to leave the security of their Hampstead home. Their father had one sister, Jane Beauchamp. She was for many years companion to a Lady Tollemache — one of a vastly rich Anglo-Irish family. Lady T. left her friend a matter of £20,000 and Aunt Jane, who had fallen under the spell of E. G. Wakefield, invested • the money in his New Zealand Company.

This meant that -various properties in and around Wellington belonged to Aunt Jane. However, this does not seem to have been a very pressing attraction for it

was not until the early sixties that two of the brothers, Arthur and Cradock, having exhausted the possibilities of making a ‘-fortune on the Australian gold, fields, came over -to claim their inheritance. This consisted of prime sections in a growing town. , With true Beauchamp instinct for backing a losing horse, Arthur exchanged his share for land in Pictop; while Crad settled for virgin country at the head of the Grove Arm, where he started clearing and farming, an occupation for which he seems to have been singularly unfitted. Eight brothers The Beauchamp brothers were: Samuel, John, George Frederick, Henry Heron, Horatio, Arthur, Cradock and Ralph. Sam was tubercular; he gave up the struggle of colonial life, headed for home again, but died one day out from Sydney Heads. John died in infancy. George Frederick has, up to the writing of this little tale, been an unknown quality, but of him more anon.

Henry, my grandfather, did so well in Sydhey that after 20 years he returned to England and lived there happily ever after. Horatio founded a good business in Melbourne and has left a flock of Australian cousins.

Arthur was a highly .talented rolling stone who left a large family, a host of friends and a granddaughter known to the

world as Katherine Mansfield: Cradock,. a dreamy poetic type with a redoubtable and very intellectual wife raised, a large family on 'his farm at Ahakiwa. My grandfather, Henry, on a world' tour in 1874, stayed with him. He wrote home . . . “Staying here with brother Crad. Six cows, nine child-

R. R. BEAUCHAMP, of Kennedy’s Bush Road, writes a fragment of family history. ren, 12 ducks, 25 hens, 50

sheep — to all of which poor Crad gives their meat in due season.” Ralph was very tall and thin. His letters have a certain odd humour and hint of other worldliness. One day this world got too much foi; him; he swam out to sea and that was the end of Ralph.

In the winter of 1.974 descendants of the seven brothers gathered at Picton and Anakiwa. It was no particular anniversary — just a common urge to get together ahd see how the other cousins had fared and what they looked like. One hundred and fifty out of an estimated 400 turned

up. They were chiefly New Zealanders* i but . descendants of Horatio , came from Australia and a niece of Katherine Mansfield from Britain.

Tulioe people There were also three Maori and part-Maori families who declared they were the descendants of one George Beauchamp who had come from Australia and married a girl of the Tuhoe people in the Urewera country. The family records gave no clue to the identity of this George. One of the seven brothers was George Frederick.

According to Sir Harold Beauchamp in his book ‘Reminiscences and Recollections’, George F. came to Australia with a wife and three children and died soon after arriving. The brothers then paid the wife’s fare back to England and Henry adopted Emma while Horatio took Fred and Clare.

Now this always seemed to me a slightly fishy story. Why should the mother have handed over her children; and why is there no mention of this business in the family letters.

Harold goes on to say, “Emma married John Frederic Maunsell: Clare married an American named

George Washington Ford; and what became of Fred, I do not know.” And there the matter rested until our 7 Maori cousins turned up at Picton and were quite emphatic that there ancestor George was of the same stock as Sir Harold and K.M. and many others up and down New Zealand who bear the name. First clue What did ‘become of Fred’? The first clue came in a letter from Ann, the mother of the seven sons, to Henry Heron, my grandfather. The date was March 1859. .

‘Frederick keeps ybu acquainted 'With my business affairs’ and- later in the letter ... ‘I have, proposed to Fred if any arrangement (when he has given the name and title of wife to the mother of his children) could be made to share a house with him’. Now, what have we here! The middle of Good Queen Victoria’s reign; the mother of nine children, with an impeccable C of E background. Two of the children had died in infancy; six sons have gone to Australia. Fred, good and loyal, has stayed to keep an eye on his widowed mother — and Fred has a de facto wife and three children!

No wonder Harold was not very forthcoming about his uncle Fred. Harold Beauchamp was a good citizen and a remarkable man of business. With a dreadful child 'like K.M. he proved himself a good, generous and forbearing father. But Harold was conventional —- and that’s putting it mildly. As one biographer of K.M. said ... ‘He was probably the richest and certainly the stuffiest man in New Zealand’.

No wonder Uncle George Frederick was swept under the carpet and his son, also George Frederick,- was allowed to vanish into the mists of the Urewera country, there to found a family of stalwart Beauchamps who certainly had not Harold’s rosy cheeks and sandy hair. Well, unlike Sir Harold, who knew everything except ‘what became of young Fred’, I have found out what became of him. And this is the story. Death certificate The Registrar-General in Sydney turned up George Frederick Beauchamp’s death certificate. He was the third of seven brothers: the Fred whose irregular marital affairs so worried his mother.

It confirmed the fact that after his mother’s death in June, 1859, he had taken his children to Sydney where he himself died in July, 1861, aged 42.

But the big surprise was in item 12 of the certificate which showed that he had, in London at the age of 41, married Ann Fox; their children then being: George Frederick (Young Fred) aged. 18: Clare,ll: Emma, 7: Annie, 3. Better late than never! But one wonders whether poor Ann was at death’s door and Fred did the decent thing; or whether, if. you wanted to take children to Australia, you, had to show they were legitimately yours. Anyway, this put young Fred well in the running as ancestor of the Maori Beauchamps.

He was 18 when his father died and Horatio adopted him and his sister Clare.

Now, Horatio was a rather stern and religious uncle. Of a Saturday evening it was his custom to mount a soap box on Melbourne street corners and call down fire and brimstone on all drinkers and other evil men.

Not surprising, then, that young Fred, with his somewhat irregular upbringing, left his uncle’s care as soon 1 as he could. And what bettter place to go than New Zealand, where he had two uncles and a Maori war was brewing. Confirmation The final confirmation came when the Turnbull Library produced the information that ... ‘George Frederick Beauchamp, of Waikaremoana, applied in 1910 for a replacement, copy of his discharge papers from the Armed Constabulary, in which he served from 1868 to 1885; the original having been destroyed by fire.’

So this is ‘what became of Fred’. The Maori cousins at the Picton reunion told me his children were George, Sam, John, Henry, and Arthur — names of the yet unseen Australian uncles of his London boyhood. Arthur, a hearty 83 and still living at Wairoa, confirms this. The family lived in the Urewera country and education was minimal. Now the fourth and fifth generations, with varying additions of both Maori and pakeha blood have fitted into the very satisfactory pattern of racial relationships which have evolved in New Zealand. I am sure old John Beau- ‘ champ, always known to his seven sons as the PaMan, would have approved. Ann Stone, whose picture painted by her brother-in-law, Charles Leslie, R.A., is over my mqntlepiece, must have grieved for her absent family. But I think that if she had been with us at the Picton reunion she, too, would have approved. And I hope she would have forgiven Fred his lapse from strict Victorian morals.