CENTENARIAN’S STORY.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20342, 27 June 1934, Page 1

CENTENARIAN’S STORY.

Defeated Death When He Was Twenty. LONDON, June 21. Bed ridden for the last two years, Francis Bourn, of New Cross, who has just had his 102nd birthday, told the special representative of the “ Sunday Sun ” that when he was 20 a doctor warned him that he was liable to die of tuberculosis. Accordingly, in January, 1853, he left for Australia in the sailing ship Winchester, with five companions, the party having pledged themselves to stick together and share all perils and rewards. Reaching Melbourne, they .walked eighty-eight miles to the Loddon goldfields, but they found the conditions so hard that the other five abandoned the venture after a fortnight's toil. Bourn stuck it out with mixed luck, but never got within sight of the fortune he had hoped for. Subsequently, he earned £5 a week as a painter and paperhanger in Melbourne and, two years later, with his health completely restored, he return- I ed to England. A few years later, he organised another party and joined ; Garibaldi’s army. Bourn said he revisited Australia in j the seventies and the eighties, but he I was afraid that now the old pioneering spirit had died out, and he thought the best thing to do would be to hand j over the country to the Japanese, who * would at least put their backs into developmental work.