BARONET IN EXILE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3829, 2 August 1927, Page 18

BARONET IN EXILE.

DEATH IN OLD HUT. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, July 25. In an old hut in the mining village of Smythesdale, near Ballarat (Victoria), Sir Clayton Pennington Freeling, a 70-year-old baronet, and the last holder of a title created in 1828, died recently, poorly clad, poorly housed, friendless, and 13,00(1 miles away from his people and ancestral home. The cold print of ‘“Debrett,” the inventory of the British peerage and baronetage, tells but little of this baronet’s human interest story. It shows that he was born in 1857, that he married (but does not say who), that he had no children, that he resided in Australia, that he inherited the title in 1916 from his uncle.

The human interest begins with the marriage item in “Debrett.” The woman, Clayton Freeling married was a “nobody,” or at least Clayton’s family thought so, for, according to Freelings’ financial agent in Melbourne, she was forbidden entrance to the Freelings’ circle. She was beneath their social standing, and their attitude towards her remained unrelentant, even though at that time Clayton Freeling had little hope of inheriting the title. Never a lover of stiff, conventional English life, Freeling decided to cut the painter and come to Australia. Immediately on arrival here in 1905 he struck out for the backblocks, and led a wanderer’s life. During the first 10 .years or so he was allowed a remittance of £3 a week, but this eventually disappeared, and he was forced to toil for his existence. His bowyangs, according to a companion of those years, became his pride, bis almost childish pride. He loved, too, to carry a heavy swag. He got rid of his remittances as soon as they came, and was generally “stony-broke.”

In 1908, Freeling went to England and returned with his wife. But the rough life of the Australian backblocks was distasteful to her, and she soon returned to her own country, leaving him to a hermitlike existence. “ In 1913 Freeling again visited England, but lie was back in Australia when the World War broke out. The first year of the war killed off the then holder of the title, and the successor, the Rev. Sir James Freeling, his uncle, died two years later. The baronetcy then fell to Clayton Freeling, but he never went, back to his ancestral halls. Instead,

he sank gradually lower and lower down the social scale as age crept upon him, and a year or two ago he pitched his camp at Smythesdale, and there for 2s 6d a week, he rented the dilapidated hut in which his death occurred a few days ago. Ho eked out the last few months of his existence by doing odd jobs, and on the bounty of his fellows. So. in gloriously, died the last of the Freeling baronets, whose motto was: “Never, except in the meet honourable way.”