Stories from Peel Island – 7 (Jack-The-Ripper?)

Tags

Jack The Ripper, Lazaret, Peel Island, Toowong Cemetery, Walter Porriott

This week when I presented my Peel Island talk to the Redlands-Bayside Probus Club, my casual mention of Doctor Darling sparked great interest from the audience. By a sheer coincidence their August guest-speakers had been Chris Adams and Helen Goltz, authors of the books “Grave Tales” and whose topic was “Is Jack the Ripper Buried in Toowong Cemetery?”

Herewith a chapter from my 2007 book ‘Moreton Bay Reflections’:

Doctor Darling

Peel Island was not just a refuge for the Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) patients. It was also used, on one occasion at least, as a refuge from the law.

About 1950, an ageing attendant (wardsman) was employed for a year at the Lazaret. He was well educated, well spoken, and of a most agreeable disposition. He even seemed to have a grasp of medical matters and would often intersperse his conversation with complicated medical terms.

Rosemary Opala (nee Fielding) was a nurse at the lazaret at the time and remembers him as a very pleasant and cooperative employee. “It came as quite a shock to find out after he had left the island, that he was a con man!” remembers Rosemary.

He had started out in life in England as Andrew Gibson, but as a teenager he quickly learned that people were very gullible, especially unattached young women, and from cashing dud cheques, he quickly progressed to marrying wealthy women, then running off with their inheritance.

Australia proved a happy hunting ground for Andrew, but of course his strategy involved keeping one step ahead of the law and changing his name to suit the circumstances. Some of his aliases included Archibald Brown, Harry Cecil Darling, Lord Lockley, and Walter Porriott, or Gibson.

It was as Doctor Darling, Gynaecologist, that he plunged into his guise as a medico, but when one of his patients died on the operating table, his scheme was uncovered and he was sent to prison for ten years.

Andrew was 80 when he laid low at Peel Island but he was still a strikingly good looking man.

Mrs O’Leary, of Cleveland, has these comments to add: “My husband, Jack, was the nephew of Bess O’Leary, the last wife of Walt’s seven bigamous marriages. At one stage we suspected that Walt was trying to poison Bess, but fortunately he died before he was able to succeed! Now they are both buried in the Toowong Cemetery in the Catholic section near Birdwood Terrace. The grave is marked ‘Bess O’Leary and husband’. Walt remains anonymous in death as he was in life!”

The story of Walter/Andrew/Harry/etc/etc is a journalist’s delight and two articles have appeared about his strange life: George Blaikie’s “Our Strange Past” (Sunday Mail of May 25, 1986) and an article in “The Bulletin” in which the writer even suggested that Walter might have been Jack-The-Ripper because the murders stopped at the same time Walt left England. But that might be stretching things too far….

Or is it?

Peter Ludlow

31.12.2005

If this has piqued your interest I can offer this further reading:

In his webpage https://www.travellingtype.com/chasing-shadow-jack-the-ripper/

Andy writes:

• Walter Thomas Porriott lived in London at the time of the murders. He was believed to have set sail for Brisbane on November 9, 1888, the same day the fifth prostitute was murdered.
• Although now desecrated, Porriott’s headstone contained a grainy image of a caped-man raising a dagger.
• Porriott was a known misogynist who particularly hated prostitutes. He was also a fraudster who assumed many identities, marrying at least 20 women only to fleece them of their assets.
• Porriott was also a convicted murderer, having spent 10 years in jail for killing a woman while posing as a gynaecologist.
• In 1997, Porriott’s great-grandson, Steve Wilson, publicly stated that he believed his great-grandfather was Jack The Ripper.

I recommend that you also read the readers’ comments at the end. They are particularly interesting.

Bessie O’Leary’s desecrated grave in Brisbane’s Toowong Cemetery

Peel Island’s Platypus – the Incredible Hulk

Tags

Moreton Bay, Peel Island, Platypus dredge

Since 1926 the rusting remains of the dredge Platypus has been a well-know landmark for boaties frequenting the waters surrounding Peel Island. But not for much longer…

Peel Island’s Stone Jetty and the Platypus today

 The Platypus was sunk on Thursday, 21st October 1926 and with time and tide, about to claim its final vestiges, it seems appropriate to revisit some of its history both as a dredge and as a breakwater. 

On Wednesday 13th October 1926, the Brisbane Courier reported:

The End of the Platypus.

‘The love of a seaman for his ship is one of the most worthy human emotions, and many an old salt on the Queensland coast will give a sigh for the old dredger Platypus, whose demolition is now taking place at the dry dock, South Brisbane, after 40 years’ service on the Queensland coast. The oldest unit in the dredge plant of the Harbours and Rivers Department will soon be stripped of all useful gear. After that indignity is over her future Is uncertain. The Platypus, which was built about 1884, at Renfrew, is a self-contained bucket dredge. Unlike ordinary dredges, she did not require to use a barge, as she carried out the two operations of dredging and conveying the material. She differs from her successor, which will be ready for service on the Queensland coast in a few months’ timer, as her well is in the bow instead of in the stern as is the case with the new Platypus. The (old) Platypus on arrival in Queensland began her long work on the Queensland coast by opening up the port of Cairns. During the years which followed she was a frequent caller in Queensland ports. She co-operated in the early developmental work in Townsville, relieved the Wolunga in the job of making a channel at Normanton. Port Douglas, Thursday Island, Cooktown, and Brisbane where she took away the sharp bends at Kangaroo Point, and the Gardens Reach also had the use of her services. Life on board the Platypus must have run with an even tend, as only one accident of importune occurred during her long career. Crossing Moreton Bay one night 38 years ago she collided with the Tinana, sustaining very little damage from the encounter. The Platypus had many masters in her day. Among the most prominent were Captains Stewart, J. Crawford, W. J.Evans, Lawson, W. Williams. Three years ago Captain Madams handed her over to the department for the last time. Among her engineers were Messrs. S. Kavanagh, R. Gillett, G. Shipley, and Morgan Jones.’

Peel Island’s stone jetty and the Platypus in the mid 1950s.

For the next 90 years, the Platypus served faithfully as a breakwater for Peel’s stone jetty where vessels were able to unload visitors and stores for the island’s lazaret (leprosarium). One of the leprosy patients recalls:

‘For the men patients, fishing was a major pastime. Some had boats that  they moored just below the men’s compound. Several patients constructed a jetty there, using Ti-Tree posts cut from the surrounding bush. Favourite fishing spots included the coral reef just off the lazaret, and the reefs around the hulk of the dredge Platypus at the stone jetty. At times the patients would moor their boats alongside the Platypus and sleep the night on her decks ready for an early start to the next day’s fishing. Schnapper were in abundance then, as well as Parrot fish, the largest of which was some 10 lb. There was also reputed to be a 500 lb. Grouper living in the vicinity of the ‘Platypus’, a rumour that was to persist for the next half century. Red and Yellow Sweetlip, Cod, Sole, Taylor, and Flathead were also caught in abundance. 

‘Sharks, too, were very common around Peel. Not only were they present in great numbers, but their size was also enormous – Junta King, onetime launch master of the Karboora once saw two 20 foot White Pointers intertwined in their mating ritual on the surface of the water between Peel Island and Dunwich.’

Another patient, an ex-seaman, had been one of the original crew that sailed the dredge Platypus to Queensland from Scotland. After many years of service, the Platypus was sunk just off the eastern jetty as a breakwater in 1926. When the seaman contracted Hansen’s Disease (leprosy), he was sent to the lazaret as a patient, and it was ironic that both he and the Platypus were to spend their last days on Peel Island literally ‘rotting away’

(Extracts from ‘Peel Island, Paradise or Prison’ by Peter Ludlow)

Lonely Australia 1916

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National Geographic Magazine

Recently our cousin, Chris, in New York, kindly sent me a copy of the December 1916 edition of the National Geographic magazine. It is devoted entirely to Australia and provides a unique view of us from the perspective an American writing from a century ago.

If you have wondered what 200,000 bags of wheat look like, then here you are!

Here are just a few of his observations:

Australia is the most isolated of all inhabited continents and is remote from the centre of all the world’s activities.

(1916 was well before aircraft compressed the long journey time from America and Europe.)

The aboriginal population is the lowest in the scale of beings having human form.

(He would never have described them thus today.)

Australia is roughly the same size and shape as the US…Its surface lacks variety…The people live in the vegetation areas around the coast…With the exception of the Murray-Darling system, there is a lack of large rivers compared to the US

THE SETTLEMENT OF AUSTRALIA RESULTED FROM THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Curiously enough, the establishment of the first colony on the new-found continent is an episode in the history of the US. It was proposed by the British Government to utilize the land as a home for the “Loyalists” (Tories) who found life in the American Colonies uncomfortable at the close of the Revolutionary War. They were to be supplied with land and money, Malay slaves or English convicts were to be provided as laborers.

Fear of the French fleet and the removal of many Tories to Canada led to the abandonment of this scheme. ..Place must be found for undesirable citizens, who, before the Revolution, had been sent to America ….

(Then typically, the author describes our explorers, our trees especially the Eucalypts, and our unique animals.)

Australia’s White Australia policy was introduced to exclude Chinese, Japanese, and Polynesian labour.

(Today we welcome them as house owners and footballers.)

On the basis of doing a moderate amount of work amidst agreeable surroundings, most Australians are workers. Short hours are the rule, and there is a tendency to ward off competition by legislative enactments rather than to meet and overcome it. The desire for money is in most cases a desire to secure a competence, not to secure power and prestige by amassing a huge bank account.

(Then he describes our Primary producers of sheep, cattle, and cotton. Our rabbit proof fences are also highlighted.

In 1916, World War I was in full swing and there are many photos of our servicemen and women setting sail for the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East. Anticipating possible changes in national boundaries occasioned by the war, there is an interesting advertisement for a War Defying Atlas entitled Hammond’s 1917 Self-Revising Comprehensive Atlas of the World.)

Even in 1916 a US Company was quick to recognise a marketing opportunity!

Invitation – Immigration Shipping Celebration

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Immigration, Maryborough

Flyer – Immigration Shipping Celebration

Stories from Peel Island – 6 (Quarantine – T.J.Ives)

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Moreton Bay, Peel Island, quarantine

Stories from Peel Island – 6 (Quarantine – T.J.Ives)

Horseshoe Bay’s Mystery Grave

There was one grave on Peel Island, which caused quite a deal of comment. This was situated at Horseshoe Bay just above the high water mark. Inscribed simply with the initials T.J. and bearing the date 1802, the markings on the wooden cross seemed to indicate that the grave could only have been that of a crewmember of one of Matthew Flinders’ exploring trips of that year. However, Tom Welsby was later to hear from one of the elderly residents at Amity Point that the real date had been 1892 and that one of the Amity locals had changed the date by chiselling out part of the 9, thus making it a 0. In actual fact, the grave was that of T.J.Ives, a comedian and actor from Islington in London. He had travelled in the Oroya from London to Sydney, and thence in the Buninyong for Brisbane to fulfil an engagement there. Before reaching his destination, however, he and the 120 other passengers on the Buninyong were quarantined at Peel after a smallpox suspect had been reported from the Oraya.  Ives developed the disease and died aged 32 after being in Queensland only a fortnight. He was buried at Peel in the grave that was later to be the subject of a local’s sense of humour. Perhaps he would have appreciated the joke that fooled everyone for so long.

Source: Tom Welsby, Brisbane Courier 1923. 

Ives’ Grave at Horseshoe Bay (Harold ‘Sandy’ Cowell)

In the early 1990s, on one of my visits at Peel to stay with Ray Cowie, the Redland Shire Council’s Ranger there. I was surprised when he produced a large metal hoop that he had found hanging on a tree branch just behind the sand dunes to the eastern end of Horseshoe Bay. I immediately recognised it as the ship’s fitting that had been attached to the grave of T.J.Ives, whom I had written about in 1988 for my book “Peel Island, Paradise or Prison”.  We surmised that a bushfire had destroyed the wooden cross, causing the metal hoop to fall to the ground, where it would have lain for many years until a boatie picked it up and hung it off a nearby tree. Ray showed me where he had found the metal hoop, and we searched around on the ground beneath the tree on which it had been hung, hoping to find some evidence of the grave, (e.g. a coral border or a Lilly as shown in the picture) but to no avail. The grave site still remains a mystery.

Movie Invitation – Fantome Island

Tags

Aborigine, Fantome Island, Lazaret, Leprosy (Hansen's Disease), Peel Island

Movie Invitation – Fantome Island

Stories from Cleveland (New exhibits at the Redlands RSL Library and Museum)

Tags

Cleveland, Museum, WW1

The Redlands RSL Library and Museum

For anyone visiting Cleveland who is interested in war memorabilia, the Redlands RSL Library and Museum is well worth a look (even if you have just lost all your money at their ‘pokies’ across the road).

There are several new exhibits if you haven’t called in recently:

Just inside the entrance, is a cabinet that contains the memorabilia of Kevin George Conway, Sergeant Temporary Warrant Officer Class 2, 13097 – Australian Army Training Team (RAINF), who was killed in action 6 July 1964. Kevin was the first Australian killed in the Vietnam War. 52 years after his death he was returned to the Redlands and buried in an official service at the Cleveland Cemetery in front of family, friends, Federal and State Government, Redland City Council, Redlands RSL, and Vietnam Veterans representatives.

It was the fourth and final resting place for Warrant Officer Conway whose body was previously exhumed in Vietnam and then twice in Singapore.

Warrant Officer Conway was the only Australian serviceman attached to a United States Special Forces team A-726 at Camp McBride in Nam Dong.

The contents of the cabinet have now been donated by his niece Kathy Woodford

The Memorial cabinet to Kevin Conway

The museum also now contains a dedicated WWI room. Its newest exhibits are devoted to animals who served in the war:

‘Medical Dog’ mock up in the Museum’s WWI Room

‘Gas Mask Dog’ mock up in the Museum’s WWI Room

The mask shown here is only one of two still remaining in the world.

‘Tank Dog’ mock up in the Museum’s WWI Room

The Russians had trained their dogs, which were fitted with explosives, to hide under the enemy’s tanks whereupon they would be detonated. They had trained the dogs on their tanks which were diesel driven. However, the German tanks were petrol driven, and the dogs preferred the smell of diesel to petrol. The experiment literally backfired!

A gentleman in Moscow

Tags

Amor Towles, Boris Pasternak, Literature, Metropol Hotel, Moscow

 Fifty years ago this October, I briefly visited Moscow en route to the UK. There were signs that the cold war between East and West was slowly defrosting but even so I felt a sense of excitement just to be there: that I was infringing on an alien culture. I was staying at the Hotel Berlin on Red Square and the autumn cold was already seeping through the double glazed windows of my austere room. Outside, in Red Square an endless stream of Muscovites lined up outside the Lenin Mausoleum waiting their turn for a glimpse of their revolutionary hero; another line waited outside the GUM department store to shop; and at the far end of the square, St Basil’s Cathedral was undergoing restoration, though I was still able to enter and marvel at the holy icons adorning the walls of the many private chapels of the former Tsars and other Russian nobility.

St Basil’s Cathedral on Moscow’s Red Square. Undergoing restoration in 1968

The 1965 movie and hence the book of Boris Pasternak’s ‘Doctor Zhivago’ were still very much an influence on me then. For me, it helped to humanise the inhumanity that occurred during and after the Russian revolution; it was ordinary people tested in extraordinary times; it put the individual before the State – a fact that caused the Soviet Government to force Boris Pasternak to reject his Nobel Prize. 

The cover of Amor Towles 2016 book ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’

‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ is another life-affirming book full of humour and charm that brings together the profound, the political and the personal aspects of Soviet life during and after the revolution. In this case, the novel’s protagonist is Count Alexander Rostov, starting in Russia’s turbulent early 1920s and spanning 30 years. When the Count is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, he is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Having never worked a day in his life, he must now live in one room as history is being made outside.

Happily I now read that the book is soon to be made into a television adaption. Kenneth Branagh is to play the Count. I hadn’t imagined what the Count might have looked like, but Kenneth Branagh seems to be ideal. 

Moscow’s Metropol Hotel in 2018 (Google street view)

Ships quarantined at Peel Island between 1873 and 1896

Tags

Moreton Bay, Peel Island, quarantine, ships

Ships known to have been quarantined at Peel Island between 1873 and 1896::

Lammershagen(quarantined1873, January 8)
Typhoid, at least 7 deaths:
Kristine Dreseth, 30yrs
Wilhelmine Helmholz, 14yrs
Johannes Johannessen, 21 yrs
Wilhelmina Milenovski, 2 yrs
Emil Oberlie, 16 yrs
Sorrn Christiansen Sorensen, 18 yrs

Friedeburg(quarantined 1873)
Scarlet Fever
One death on Peel:
Matilda Kluck, 6 yrs (from ulcerated bowels and chronic diarrhoea)

Bobtail Nag, fromSolomon Islands (quarantined 1875, December 13-24)
Dysentery, one death between December 15-24

Gauntlet, from London (quarantined 1875, December 23)
Typhoid fever

Gazelle(German warship) (quarantined 1876, January 1)
? Disease. Maybe around 10 deaths, with graves made up and head-boards with suitable inscriptions placed at each one, unlike many of the later graves from English ships.

Indus, from Hervey Bay (quarantined 1876, March 9)
Typhoid fever.

Western Monarch,from Gravesend (quarantined 1876, March 16 until March 24 when pratique granted for most passengers)
Typhoid fever
2 deaths, one from Typhoid fever

Brisbane(+ the government ship Kate) (quarantined 1876, March 26-April 12)
Smallpox
Sir Arthur Kennedy, Governor Designate for the colony of Queensland, was required to enter quarantine, as were all passengers of the Brisbane, though quarters were arranged for him on the government paddle yacht Kate.

Woodlark (quarantined1877, late January or early February)
Typhus

Normanby, (quarantined 1877, April 25-28)
Came via Hong Kong, which had been declared an infected port – therefore automatic quarantining.

Charles Dickens, from Hamburg (quarantined 1877, July 19 (approx.)-September)
Measles, typhoid fever amongst other diseases, 18 patients in quarantine, approximately 8 deaths including: Platen, boy, Platen, girl, Idie Stephan.

Windsor Castle, from Gravesend (quarantined 1877, September 16-November 10)
Typhoid fever

Roxburgshire,fromGreenock (quarantined 1877, October 11- November 16)
Scarlet fever

Western Monarch (quarantined 1878)
Typhoid fever

Bowen(quarantined 1878)

Lammershagen, fromHamburg (quarantined 1878, August 6 – 10)

Friedeburg,fromHamburg, via Rio (quarantined 1878, October 17 -November 27)
Typhoid fever

Scottish Admiral (quarantined1878, October 20-30)
Typhoid fever

Clara(quarantined 1879, January)
Typhoid fever

Fritz Reuter, fromHamburg (quarantined 1879, January 20)
Typhoid fever

Normanby(quarantined 1879, January 30)

Somerset  (quarantined 1879, February 12)
Smallpox. Actually quarantined at the four fathoms hold (off Green Island in Moreton Bay) rather than on Peel Island, possibly because of the crowded conditions already on the island.

Southesk,from Greenock (quarantined 1882, May 13 until late May)
Measles, Typhoid Fever and 4 deaths from Whooping Cough:
James Thomas McKenzie, 18 months
Robert Rodgers, 2 yrs
Margaret Jeffrey, 9 months
Elizabeth Annie Edwards, 2 months

Caroline (quarantined1882, May (approx.) 6-9)

Duke of Westminster(quarantined 1883, September)
Smallpox, at least one death

Western Monarch,from Liverpool (quarantined 1883, October 2-14 (approx.)
Fever

Shannon (quarantined1884, March 16 Mar for approximately one week)
Scarlet Fever

Crown of Aragon (quarantined1884, July (?)-August 13)
Scarlet Fever

ExLy-ee-moon (quarantined1885, February)
Smallpox, passenger off Ly-ee-moon quarantined as a smallpox contact

Dorunda,fromLondon via Port Said, Batavia (quarantined 1885, December 19 – 1886, January 9)
Cholera, possibly 6 deaths:
John Blow, 19 yrs
Cornelius Daly, 60 yrs
Bodil Marie Klemmensen, 52 yrs
Anne M Pedersen, 22 yrs
Catrine Marie Sunstrup, 47 yrs
John Westwood, 32 yrs

Khandalla (quarantined1886, April 24 (approx.)

Merkara,from London via Malta, Port Said, Batavia (quarantined 1887, January 10)
Elizabeth Brown Wilson, 17 yrs (T)
Typhoid fever, TB
Mary Isabella Wilson, 13 yrs (TB)

GoalparafromPlymouth (quarantined 1887, January 7)
Enteritis

Bulimba(quarantined1888, January 14 (?)

Duke of Argyll (quarantined 1888, August-September 13)
Measles,1 death?

Taroba (quarantined1889, January)

Buninyong, from New South Wales (quarantined 1892, June 21 or 22- early July
Smallpox – passenger originally off the Oroyafrom London, transshipped in Melbourne.
Thomas James Ives, 32, professional singer from Islington London

Duke of Devonshire (quarantined1896, November)
Smallpox

 

List compiled by research undertaken by Peter Ludlow, Rod McLeod, Gabrielle van Willigen

Sources of information include:

• Queensland Government Gazette
• The Week – weekly newspaper magazine published by The Telegraph, starting 1876
• The Brisbane Courier, one of Brisbane’s early daily newspapers
• Details from family records of some of the people quarantined on Peel Island, communicated to Peter Ludlow.
• Wiburd C R 1945 Notes on the History of Maritime Quarantine in Queensland, 19th Century Historical Society of Queensland Inc. Journal Vol 3, No 5. December 1945 pp 369 – 383
• Jan Macintyre with material supplied by Eric and Rosemary Kopittke and Les Moreland.

 

Peel Island map

 

‘It’s Pistols at Dawn, Sir!’ (again)

Tags

Aborigine, Amor Towles, duelling, Literature, Russia

‘It’s pistols as dawn, Sir!’

Some five years ago, I blogged the question “Whatever happened to duelling?”

to which Paul Bailey replied that the first libel laws were passed to stop people from settling disputes with duels. More recently, American author Amor Towles wrote in his wonderfully perceptive book “A Gentleman in Moscow”: When duelling was first discovered by the Russian officer corps in the early 1700s, they took to it with such enthusiasm that the Tsar had to forbid the practice for fear that there would soon be no one left to lead his troops.

I had always been under the impression that duelling was a historically recent contest between two people to settle a point of honour, and, indeed, my computer’s dictionary backed me up with:  the sense of duelling as a contest to decide a point of honour dates from the early 17th century.

However, last week I participated in a seminar in which one of the speakers, Ray Kerkhove, mentioned that Australia’s Aboriginal people also conducted individual and collective duels under strict rules and fought with their traditional weapons such as spears, boomerangs or fighting sticks. Presumably, the history of their duels dates back much further than the European’s 17th century. 

Maybe our sense of honour has always been an inherent part of our human nature, and more importantly, its defence seems vital to our survival as individuals, communities, or nations.