Stories From Under The Carpet. Jane Turton
electoral rolls made an error in calling it Grove) growing vegetables and fruit. The third child, Charles and the next two younger children would have attended the “Brookes School” named after the teacher Walter Brookes. William Andrew was on the school committee and had been one of the parents who had advocated for the school to be built. Classes were held in the Wesleyan Schoolhouse on the land where the Wesleyan Church stood in Dalgety Street between 1864 and 1869.⁴² Education wasn’t compulsory in Victoria until 1872.⁴³ The Oakleigh State School which opened in 1875, would have been where the younger Andrew children studied after the closure of the Wesleyan school some years earlier.
Holy Trinity Church Oakleigh. Photo; J Turton 2017
Wesleyan School House. Source⁴⁴
Disaster struck the Andrew family around 8am on June 8, 1887. William and Alexandrina’s son, Charles, 19, called his father for breakfast. As they ate their breakfast together, they discussed how they would spend the day and what tasks needed completing in their market garden. Charles said he was tired of the sparrows eating the germinating seeds that had been planted, so he had some poisoned grain that he would use to reduce their numbers. Charles had poisoned numerous birds in the past.⁴⁵ In fact, newspapers regularly carried advertisements instructing farmers how to poison seeds: hot vinegar, water and strychnine sprinkled on seeds or oats, was guaranteed to kill sparrows!⁴⁶
After breakfast, Charles went to the field about 30 metres from the house and started spreading the poisoned grain. His father worked at the rear of the home. But very soon he heard Alexandrina screaming for help. She had found Charles in the vegetable garden foaming at the mouth and convulsing. They carried Charles into the house and laid him on the floor in the front room. William then went for the doctor.⁴⁷
Illustration; Erica Gage
Two doctors arrived, but Charles never regained consciousness. They tried to open his mouth and insert a tube to pump out his stomach, suspecting Charles had been poisoned, but the seizures had clenched his jaw firmly shut. Before they could use chloroform to stop the seizures, Charles was dead.⁴⁸
An autopsy into his death confirmed he had died of poisoning. Somehow, he had ingested his strychnine-laced grains. Strychnine was commonly used to poison birds and mice that could reach plague proportions in market gardens. Strychnine is absorbed into the body after ingesting the substance through the mouth and stomach, inhaling through the nose or even absorbing it through the eyes.⁴⁹ Alexandrina told the coroner that Charles had frequently complained of stomach pains, a likely symptom of low-grade strychnine poisoning. The coroner determined that the amount of strychnine on a single grain was more than ten times the dose that could kill a man. Perhaps Charles’s death was due to a sudden change in the wind that had blown the grain dust into his face?
William and Alexandrina had now lost three children. But their grief did not end with Charles’s death. Less than a decade later, tragedy struck again. In 1885, their unmarried daughter Mary, 26, died of tuberculosis at the family home in Albert Grove.⁵⁰ Then three years later in 1888, their son Robert, aged 24, also died of tuberculosis.⁵¹ Finally, in 1890, youngest son George, 24, also died of the same disease.⁵²
Heartbroken, William and Alexandrina now had only one surviving child, William James. A few years later they too died, leaving William their sole survivor. William and Alexandrina were buried with the other children in the Oakleigh Pioneer Cemetery. William Junior erected a monument to his family at the grave site but neglected to mention his oldest siblings, William and Eliza who had died before he was born.
Andrew family memorial, Oakleigh Cemetery. Photo; J Turton 2017
How did the Andrews’ last child spend his life? Was he too destined to die young? Could he possibly live a long and healthy life after so much death in his own family? William James Andrew was 32 and still single after his parents, and six siblings had died. He stayed living in the family home in Albert Grove, and in 1895, a year after his mother’s death, married Mary Jane Merriman, 28, the daughter of a local resident John Merriman. The couple remained in the Andrews’ home and raised their two sons, another son having died in infancy. William died at 78 after 36 years as a councillor, including serving six terms as Mayor of Oakleigh. He was also a churchwarden at the Holy Trinity Church and a life governor of both the Alfred Hospital and the Talbot Colony for Epileptics in Mulgrave. As mayor, William had been a strong advocate for building the Oakleigh lake baths, which were north of Dandenong Road in Oakleigh. He was a Justice of the Peace⁵³ and was a well-respected member of the Oakleigh community.⁵⁴ Mary Jane was also involved in the Oakleigh community, serving as Treasurer for the Oakleigh Benevolent Society.⁵⁵
Mary Jane died 14 years after her husband, living as a widow with her sons in the family home.⁵⁶ She and her husband are buried in the Oakleigh Cemetery.⁵⁷ Her two sons survived her.
William Aedy, 1888
William Aedy was the adventurous type, and perhaps he liked to push the boundaries.
He was the fifth of six children born in Finchley, North London, in 1831 to Edmond Aedy and Nancy Pope.⁵⁸ At the age of 20, William left England aboard the ship Success, arriving in Geelong in 1852.⁵⁹ Because of the gold rush that had begun in Victoria the year before, more ships brought passengers to Melbourne than to anywhere else in the world.⁶⁰ William possibly tried to find his fortune on the goldfields. Two years later his older brother Henry sailed to Melbourne aboard the ship Daylesford⁶¹ and the two went to stay with an aunt in Oakleigh in the Parish of Mulgrave, east of Melbourne. Aunt Louisa and her husband Emmett Charles William (William) Wentworth had arrived in the colony in 1849 aboard the Mary Shepherd.⁶² Perhaps William Wentworth had written home to William Aedy encouraging him to come and work the land in Victoria. William and Henry’s mother Nancy never gave up hope that her boys would return to England and help on the family farm. She sent them letters asking them to come home until her death in 1873. But sadly, neither son had the chance. Amazingly, Nancy’s letters still reached her sons in Oakleigh, despite her convoluted postal instructions, shown below.
Letter to William and Henry from their mother. Source⁶³
By 1856, William and Henry had become landowners – together paying £60⁶⁴ for sections 19 and 21 of Crown Portion 45 in the Parish of Mulgrave, buying the land from their uncle, William. William Wentworth had purchased the same property two years earlier for £136⁶⁵ – more than twice the sum. Was Uncle William giving his nephews a helping hand by selling his estate at a significantly reduced amount?
The following year another block in the same Crown Portion was sold to John Francis Moore. John and his wife, Faithful had arrived in Victoria in 1853 aboard the Arabian.⁶⁶ They had a large family, although William only had eyes for their eldest daughter, Rebecca Jane. By 1863 Rebecca was only 18 when she and 32-year-old William married and settled on sections 19 and 21.⁶⁷
Disaster struck the brothers when Henry died suddenly of liver failure in 1865.⁶⁸ He was 36 and is buried in the Oakleigh Cemetery.⁶⁹ He had never married.
Map of area courtesy of Clive Haddock
A year before William and Henry had bought their land, Richard Gardner Cooke sold sections 23, 25, 27 and 29 in the same Crown Portion of land to Mark Frederick Ogle, a pharmacist living in Maryborough more than 185 kilometres west of Melbourne.⁷⁰ Ogle had once