I was recently sent the following story by Mary Mayenfisch about her Grandfather, Thomas J TOBIN, in her words of
“the whole story reads like a film! “Outlander” in Australia…. “
On Easter Sunday in the time of Covid 19 – when in the throes of James Joyce “Ulysses” the Jesuit schools in Ireland came to my mind. Clongowes, Belvedere, Gonzaga- and St Stanislaus, Tullabeg [1] where my grandfather, Thomas J Tobin was educated. The school is closed now, it seems, and they joined up with Clongowes Wood College, Clane a long time ago. A “Catholic school for young students for young upper-class Catholic boys” and under the heading notable alumni, really! There he is…
Thomas Joseph TOBIN ESQ
Barrister and Solicitor, Gentlemen of Ireland cricket player.
My grandfather! That severe-looking gentleman with the handlebar moustache was last seen in an old photograph when I lived in the family home in Athy, Kildare, Ireland. The Grandfather we had never met, as he died 25 years before I was born. Died in Western Australia, he had an attack in the courtroom in Kalgoorlie (according to the local papers). Buried in a lonely graveyard in Kalgoorlie, that dry, solitary place surrounded by ever-flowering red bushes, in that austere, bare and memorable place.
My father told us stories, we, the children he never believed he would have. A self-confessed bachelor until the age of 35, he had been, according to the family, a “great catch”. The most eligible bachelor in the town, my mother used to tell us, his family called him “The Australian”. A man who was born in Australia, born to an Irish emigrant family, to that famous cricket player, lawyer and adventurer TJ Tobin and his wife, Elizabeth (Bessie), my grandmother, only known to me and my siblings because of that carefully preserved photo, always kept on the mantelpiece in the study, our television room.
“You look like her”, our old neighbour used to tell me from time to time.
Thomas J Tobin, noted alumni, cricketer and former student of St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg. What happened to him, you might ask. That seemingly well-known, well-born gentleman who set sail for Australia at the very beginning of the 20th century, different times. Women in long dresses, men in hats, carrying sticks. Setting sail for Australia, what courage. Why did he do that, I wonder? He was a young, educated man, one who would have made a good living in Kilkenny or New Ross, the town where he was born. Kilkenny where he played cricket with the elite, the British who brought the game to that elegant, reasonably sized midlands town. A person who, as a young man, was a fast pitcher and while, according to old records, was not always on his game, a bit wild, a bit of his own man perhaps. A man who travelled with “The Gentlemen of Ireland” Irish cricket team to the United States and to Canada to play cricket for Ireland, rare in those days. A man who married Elizabeth O’Neill, some years his junior, on the 17 April 1901 in Athy, Co. Kildare. Then the two of them shortly afterwards left their native land to seek out adventure in that new country, Australia.
The Fairytale
A few years ago, on a rainy day in Switzerland, I found part of the trail to that man I had never met, in the form of records of the first Irish sporting event ever photographed, it took place in Philadelphia that same year the Yorkshire Ripper was terrorizing the imagination and the women just across the Irish sea. This cricket match, Ireland v Philadelphia, took place in Pittsburg in 1886 and Ireland, represented by “The Gentlemen of Ireland”, lost. Apparently, Grandfather did not perform well that day. Reports say “Thomas Tobin, hatless and padless came onto the pitch….” I wonder why he was hatless and padless? In any case, Ireland lost. Some years after that famous match, that cricketer, solicitor and barrister, later a defender of gold miners in Kalgoorlie and Cue, made his way with his new wife to that new country of hope, Australia.
West Australian 31 October 1896, page 12
This is a fairytale, isn’t it? Their life is beginning to read like the series “Outlanders”, that story of the Scots and their move to the new land, but I am digressing, but this story must, in some way, resemble the story of my grandparents. Arriving in Australia, first living in Perth, a respectable solicitor and his wife, then moved to a more deserted part of the country, places where the search for gold may have started, places like Cue, Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie. Whatever brought those genteel-born Irish people to those places? Life in Perth might have been more comfortable, closer to the homes they had left? With other emigrants, coming from similar backgrounds, but this is all pure speculation on my part, what do I know of their reasons?
Be as it may, their moves to Cue WA and TJ’s later move to Kalgoorlie are well documented, my father recounted their story in great detail. His stories and memories motivated my trip to learn more about the family story, but especially to visit TJ Tobin’s grave, one summer during my college summer break. I’ll come back to that later…
Not Quite the Same
We knew as children that our father had lived a very different life from the other fathers in Ireland. He had been born in Australia and had to be baptized on his marriage day as they could never find his birth certificate (although reliable rumour had it he was baptised by the Bishop of Geraldton). Pictures of the young dashing man he had been littered around the house, letters he sent to his mother when he finally, as a young man, took the boat back to Australia with his father in the late 1920s. Letters to his lady friend when he came back to Ireland, we read them all……I need to fill you in on how that happened, why he came home, and why we, his three children, were all born in Ireland.
Back to the beginning of the century – TJ Tobin and his young wife are in Australia, little is known of their life together, were they happy, was she homesick, was he a good husband? That we don’t know but we do know that they had 4 children together, 2 boys and 2 girls.
Patrick Robert TOBIN born 1903
Margaret Mary TOBIN born 1906
Elizabeth Mary Gerard TOBIN born 1907
Thomas Brian TOBIN born 1909
Only one of those four children was to survive, my father, Thomas Brian Tobin. Being an only child was lonely, he often told us, fortunately, he had 8 first cousins who lived nearby, which eased the burden. In or around 1911, that little 2-year-old boy and his mother had set sail from Fremantle, Western Australia and took the long trip back home by boat to the home where the writer and her siblings were born, many years later, home to Kildare, Ireland. TJ Tobin stayed behind in Australia.
Arriving in Ireland, my father’s story of his first contact with grass (or was it snow) stayed etched in his memory, the life he had in that big, old, Georgian house where he lived with his mother, bachelor uncles, widowed aunt and the very old grandmother in the bed upstairs, he shared his life with us.
My father and mother married in the 40s, as children we always knew he had an unusual story to tell, and he recounted it at different times, in different ways. The old photos around the house told us something, my father on a boat heading to Australia with his father in the 1920s. Yes, that 2-year-old boy who came to Ireland on a boat with his mother did return to Australia, to Kalgoorlie, that gold mining town north of Perth, with his father when he was about 19. TJ Tobin had managed to come back to Ireland in the year of the Ecumenical Council, tickets that year were either free or very reasonable, a way of allowing emigrants the possibility to come home, so his father returned for the last time to Ireland and my father returned to Australia with him, that must have broken his mother’s heart.
Kalgoorlie Miner 22 May 1931, page 4
They made a life there in Australia for a couple of years, my father worked in all sorts of places, doing jobs he would probably never have undertaken at home on the farm in Kildare. He even found true love, Bernadine, he told us all about her, and apparently, she never forgot him, I forgot to tell you that I tracked her down many years later in Perth…. We, the children, felt we knew her already from the old photos and the stories.
Retracing my father’s footsteps
My father’s ill health meant travel, even local travel, was next to near impossible. So, it was up to me, wasn’t it? Couldn’t I retrace his journey, find the grave of the father he had buried before travelling back to Ireland in 1932, lay a wreath on that lonely tomb, during my father’s lifetime, reassure him that his late father had received at least one visit. Yes, that was something I could do.
So, skipping ahead to that summer just after my 20th birthday, when I took the plane to Australia and after some time spent working and living with family in Tasmania, I found myself alone travelling on a train on the west coast of Australia, on my way to Kalgoorlie, on a mission to reconnect some pieces of our family history. I will never forget that early arrival in that unknown town, at 6 o’clock in the morning, on an empty street, Hannan Street, everything was shuttered. A man in the street gave me some directions to the cemetery, I had some worn photographs my father had given me, and I knew what the grave looked like.
“You need to talk to Jack Hocking,” the man said,
“he was the editor of the Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie newspaper, he knows everything and everyone, he may remember your grandfather, I’ll take you to his place”, So, he did, and after coffee in his house, Jack Hocking and I set off to accomplish my personal mission, to make the trip my father could not make, to visit the place he had left a lifetime before. Hard to describe how I felt, how imagination and reality fused together and how memories of the past and the present just became part of my own story. That man in the picture, that picture of a stern gentleman with a handlebar moustache, a man who I knew but didn’t know. A man with a story but what was that story? Why had he left his country, why had he taken his young wife and sailed away from all they knew? What was he looking for? This was not a family forced to leave with all those other Irish emigrants because of famine or hardship, this was a man with a future, a man of the law, a sportsman, a Gentleman of Ireland. What was the story, really? Time to visit, time to pay my respects.
My father had often talked about the 3 siblings he had lost, the sisters and brother who had perished in the town where he was born, Cue the town was called. Why did they die? How could you lose your children in this way? “My mother was afraid I would die”, Dad told us, “she suffered from epilepsy, so she decided to return to Ireland”. Strange story, an Irish woman in those times leaving her husband in Cue, Australia making her way to Fremantle and coming home. We knew those children had died very young, maybe with diphtheria we were told, many young children died in this way.
The entries for the Tobin Children in the Cue Cemetery:
TOBIN Elizabeth Mary Gerard, 10 mths, RC, b 24 Dec 1908, Loc A-8-11, Father: Thomas Joseph TOBIN, Mother: Elizabeth ONEILL, Reg 28/1908 Murchison.
TOBIN Margaret Mary 5 mths, RC, b 31 Oct 1906, Loc A-8-11, Father: Thomas Joseph TOBIN, Mother: Elizabeth ONEILL, Reg 65/1906 Murchison.
TOBIN Patrick Robert, 10 wks, RC, b 19 Nov 1903, Loc A-8-11, Father: Thomas Joseph TOBIN, Mother: Elizabeth ONEILL, Reg 1602/1903.
Europeans perhaps didn’t know how to care for their babies in the Outback, which was another explanation, they may have died of dehydration. Was the sadness, the grieving, the distance all too much? Whatever the reason, my grandmother came back to her roots, to her family and my father grew up in the midst of the family in the peaceful countryside, surrounded by family, cousins, by neighbours who had known the family, dead and alive forever – homecoming must have been bittersweet.
Australia – Always Present
So, my trip back to the place he had loved, was precious to him. Before my departure for Australia in 1977, my father and I scoured his photo albums together, revisiting places and people, we planned my trip and although he hated my leaving, he hated any of his children leaving him, life was too uncertain (“Every time a car leaves the yard, Mary is in it”, was his mantra, half joking, half in earnest- he loved us dearly, life had shown him what loss was….) When I finally arrived in Kalgoorlie early on that clear morning, I knew my father was with me in spirit. When I found the grave where he had buried his father in 1931, I knew exactly why I was there over 40 years later, it was to honour him and his father. Powerful is the only way I can describe that moment, spiritual and real, a moment never to be forgotten.
Time and space, the past and the future became one. TJ Tobin, that notable character, the one mentioned in the report on the “First photo of an Ireland game”, the person mentioned in the Cricket Archives of Ireland as “a tearaway fast bowler” and one who “deserves to be remembered in Irish Cricket history, not only as a man who featured – somewhat disastrously – in two very dramatic finishes, but also – and more so – as a wholehearted fast bowler, who could always be relied upon to do his utmost for club and country. The man who toured the United States and Canada with the Gentlemen of Ireland in 1886 and 1887 who in that game in Philadelphia was “the last man in” and “was at the back of the pavilion when his predecessor was dismissed, who “was rushed to the wicket gloveless and pad less”. Whose “stay was short-lived” (when) … the spectators, 10,000 in all, descended on the Victors”.
That man who did not have the easiest of childhoods, whose parents died when he was young, was a ward of court and a boarder in St Stanislaus College, Tullabeg (where apparently, the cricket facilities were according to some, superior to those in Eton), who had travelled widely, adventured to Australia, to be finally laid to rest in that quiet, lonely graveyard in that mining town, Kalgoorlie.
One mission accomplished, still so many questions about the story, and my own father’s story still needed some answers. Enquiries in Kalgoorlie about the long-lost girlfriend, Bernadine, sent me back to Perth. She was still alive, she would love to meet me, she did remember my father, we had afternoon tea. My father and she corresponded for some years afterwards, and the Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie newspaper often arrived in the post, with much excitement, the connection back to Australia was another story to be shared with friends and family.
The Lost Children
There was still a troubling part of the story – the Tobin siblings, my father’s brother and sisters. Where had they died, what really happened to them? That trip from Cue to Fremantle to take the boat to Ireland, what a decision, what a heavy burden to bear. Today that seems so difficult to envisage, 670 kilometres from Cue to Fremantle- how did they travel? Train, probably. How long did that take? For that Irish woman, travelling with her 2-year-old child, leaving her husband in that mining town, hard to imagine the emotion, the confusion, and the distance.
Cue, Australia- Established in 1893, once the centre of the Murchison Goldfields, boasting a population of 10,000 back in those days the town of Cue had its beginnings, apparently, when an Aboriginal prospector, named Governor, found a ten-ounce nugget at Cuddingwarra, 9 miles west of the present-day Cue. Cue, the birthplace of my father, Thomas Brian Tobin in 1909. Was it gold that brought my grandparents to this place? The fact that TJ Tobin, was a gold miner’s lawyer, and the heart attack he had when in the court building in Kalgoorlie in 1931, this is part of the family story.
In 2017, my sister, Lys, and her husband, Michael, followed the trail to Cue and as described by Michael they “drove the 650km from Perth to Cue arriving in the dark after 8pm. The road verge was strewn with bodies of kangaroos killed by collisions with the numerous road trains that travel the outback of Australia. This made the last hour of driving in the dark with kangaroo silhouettes appearing out of nowhere a bit disconcerting, to say the least.
When they finally arrived in Cue these intrepid investigators not only uncovered the history and story of Cue but also located the grave of our uncle and aunts, a grave without a headstone, bearing the number 223. The children, Patrick Robert Tobin, (born 1903) Margaret M. Tobin, (1906) and Elizabeth M.G. Tobin, (1907), all died as infants, all aged less than 12 months. The causes of death: syncope and gastroenteritis, enteritis and asthenia, acute gastritis, vomiting and dentition, and exhaustion. The only surviving child Thomas Brian Tobin, my father, was born in Dowley Street, Cue on the 7th of March 1909. His mother was 33 years old and his father was 44 years old, TJ Tobin and his wife, Elizabeth
O’Neill, my grandparents. What a tragedy, what a start to life for my father.
The subsequent trip by my grandmother with her young son from Fremantle back to the safety and security of Ireland is more than understandable. An Irish emigrant story, unusual only in my grandmother’s return to her roots. So many Irish never returned home. Ireland is full of the stories of those who left and never returned.
To conclude this story, there is one last thing I hope we can do, we need to place a headstone on the grave of those 3 lost children in Cue, a plaque in their memory not just with the number 223, but with their names, Patrick, Margaret and Elizabeth Tobin. RIP
Photos of Thomas Tobin’s Grave 2023 – Kalgoorlie Cemetery – Photo Danelle Warnock
Western Argus 26 May 1931, page 23
TRAGIC COURT EPISODE MR. T. J. TOBIN COLLAPSES DEATH IN HOSPITAL. Mr. Thomas Joseph Tobin, solicitor and barrister, of Western Australia, breathed his last Thursday in St. John of God Hospital a couple of hours after his admission to that institution. To use a somewhat trite phrase he literally “died in harness.” He was engaged for the defendant in a Local Court case. The plaintiff was represented by Mr H. T. Stables, and the, defendant by Mr Tobin. The case came on for hearing at 10 o’clock yesterday morning. Just after 11 o’clock, whilst Mr Stables was putting points to a witness, Mr Tobin’ who was seated in his chair, suddenly collapsed.
Mr Stables ran around the table for the assistance of his “learned friend” Mr Geary came from the bench for the same purpose. So did Constable Doogue, in the position of Court Orderly. Mr Tobin was assisted into the judge’s library. In response to calls for assistance came Dr Webster, following upon whose footsteps were Dr Byrne, the immediate medical attendant of Mr. Tobin.
They diagnosed the case to be one of a serious nature. The ambulance was summoned. Dr Byrne desired Mr Tobin to allow himself to be conveyed downstairs upon a stretcher, but he was met with a refusal. As testimony to, his fortitude Mr Tobin walked down stairs to the motor ambulance in Hannan street. Upon arrival at the hospital everything was done, but it was of no avail. Towards 2 o’clock
he passed beyond the vale of tears.
The deceased gentleman had not enjoyed good health for the past few years, but only his own immediate associates and his doctor knew anything about the malady that suddenly seized him and put an end to his life. The late Mr. Thomas Joseph Tobin, who can be truly described as being one of nature’s gentlemen, was born in County Wicklow, Ireland, 63 years ago. He received his education at preparatory school and college and became an undergraduate of the Dublin University. A member of an influential family, he became articled to a firm of solicitors. Whilst he was at the Dublin University he was fond of sports and was a prominent athlete. He was particularly keen on cricket, and he once piloted a team across the Irish Channel to try conclusions with teams in England. A six-footer in height, and of lithe build, he was a champion high jumper among the Dublin amateurs of his day. All this goes back to his personal history of the years he spent before he came to Western Australia.
Everyone will be interested to learn that the late Mr Tobin voyaged out with Mr “Ned” Harney. They established a practice in Coolgardie in the early days. Mr Tobin was then admitted as a barrister to the Bar of this State. Mr Harney became a Senator. “the member for the Australian Bight.” When Mr. “Ned” Harney and Mr Tobin dissolved their partnership in Coolgardie, Mr Tobin migrated to Fremantle and subsequently, for a brief period, to Geraldton. When Mr. F. C. Cowle parted with, his practice in Cue, on the Murchison, in 1900, to Mr. Palfreyman.
Mr Tobin travelled to the Murchison, and became the other lawyer in practice there for several years. Coming to Perth. he eventually arrived in Kalgoorlie 10 or 12 years ago as a representative of the firm of Messrs. J and R. Maxwell, for whom Mr Maxwell had acted for a long while at Menzies. Mr Tobin, after the departure of Mr J. Maxwell for Perth, practised in Kalgoorlie on his own account. When Messrs. P J and Frank O’Dea both went to the coast, Mr Tobin became associated with them upon the goldfields in the firm known as Messrs O’Dea, Tobin and O’Dea. Mr Tobin visited Ireland a couple of years ago to see his wife and son. The latter. Mr Brian Tobin, now upon these goldfields, came out to West Australia with him. Mrs Tobin died, as announced by cable message, three or four months after her husband’s return to his adopted State. The late Mr Tobin was a gentleman of many estimable qualities. He was well-read and informed and was esteemed by all people.
Mary Mayenfisch-Tobin
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Stanislaus_College
To be continued – The story of the Harney Brothers
Moya Sharp
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Great to read this! Mary Mayenfisch-Tobin is my cousin. My mother was a first cousin of her father Brian.