William Trewin: 'Rhoda Mountjoy is my niece. She has been staying with me on a visit for about three weeks

That year Eliza was 36; Mary Jane was 34. We may safely presume that the baby girl born seven years later (in 1870), who died the same year, was her last child.

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The first two, Josiah and Mary, are given as deceased in 1903. In fact, as they do not appear in the 1861 Census for Calstock, they must have died before the Census was taken. The oldest surviving son and daughter are given as Charles, now aged 52, and Elizabeth Mary Palmer, aged 50. These are clearly the Charles and Mary, who featured, aged 11 and 9, in the Calstock Census. Next comes Richard, aged 39; Henry, aged 38; and Anne Glasson, 36. There is no mention of the eighth child, a baby girl, who was born, and died in 1870.

Morrisons, where the family had lived since 1864 at least, was a small community, halfway along the road between Geelong and Ballarat, and just off it. It took its name from a family of miners called Morrison, one of whose daughters, Elizabeth Jane Morrison died of TB a week before Eliza Glasson. She was 35, unmarried, and is described in the Register of Death as a 'lady'. Both women, the consumptive Elizabeth and our debilitated Eliza were buried in Morrisons cemetery in the same week.

So two Honeycombes, Eliza and Mary Jane, emigrated in 1862 or 63.

The fact that a cousin of their father emigrated in 1850 may have had some influence on them. This of course was William Honeycombe the stonemason, born in 1797 and like his cousin, Will, in Calstock. With this William went his wife and four of his children, to be followed in 1853 and 1854 by two more of his children, Richard and Jane. As we know, they all settled in Victoria - as did the other Honeycombe family who emigrated from Calstock. Not in South Australia or New South Wales, where there were gold and copper mines. All sailed to Melbourne. Was this a coincidence, or was there some interchange of information between the families, even letters, and did the other Calstock Honeycombes, the Ennors and the Glassons learn from the example and experiences of William the stonemason and his children in the 1850s in Australia? Or did they follow a third sister - Ann?

As it happens, Ann was almost certainly the first of Will the miner's children to sail from England. She left Liverpool on 1 February 1863, on the Clara, and was one of several hundred single young men and women, mainly from Scotland and Ireland, who were travelling out to take up prearranged jobs in Victoria.

The Shipping List describes Ann Honeycombe as a 'general servant', aged 26, a Wesleyan and states she could read and write. But under the column By Whom Engaged there is a blank - no record of whom she was with or where she was going. This is unusual: more than 90 percent of the servants, housemaids and cooks with whom she is listed are registered as having jobs and

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A point of interest in the Shipping List is that the date of departure from Liverpool (22 December 1862) has been crossed out and '1st February 1863' added. This could have been the result of a clerical error. But it could mean that the departure of the ship was postponed, because of bad weather, and that Ann was forced to wait in a crowded warehouse dockside dormitory for unaccompainied women, for several seeks before the Clara sailed. It is highly unlikely that any delay would have been communicated to passengers travelling to Liverpool from all over Britain, most of whom would have left their homes several days before the scheduled date of sailing.

However, the fact that Ann's mother died on 8 January 1863 must have had some bearing on Ann's decision to emigrate. Surely she would not have made this decision if her mother was ill or dying. It would seem that Ann either left Calstock in mid-December while her mother was as well as ever. Or that she suddenly made her mind up after her mother's death, hurried north and acquired a steerage berth on the first ship sailing to Melbourne, which happened to be the (already delayed) Clara?

What other reasons might she have had for such a drastic, irrevocable action?

The 1861 Census reveals that she was 24 and living with her parents, four younger sisters and younger a brother, and that she was a copper dresser. The pressures of a cramped insanitary cottage shared by eight people may have prompted a yearning to escape; both her older sisters had long been married, and there she was, in 1862, aged 25 and still unwed.

The Wesleyan Chapel in Gunnislake where the Honeycombe girls would have sat on Sundays, may have afforded few spiritual or other consolations. A high and sombre hall, built in 1856, it could seat 1000 people, more than the parish church. More definite distractions would have been the tourists arriving by paddle-steamer who crowded the quays and streets of Calstock at weekends and in the summer, as would any river-trip Ann made with a friend or her sisters to Plymouth. Such a trip would have been a rare event, however, as they cost a shilling return, and she was earning about a shilling a day. But in Plymouth there was more excitement and different pleasures than the doubtful ones provident by the coarser company in Calstock. There were fashionable ladies and gentlemen in Plymouth, and real shops, and a plenitude of men in naval and military uniform. Did she ever love and lose a young soldier or miner? And lose more than that to him?

Not much of great note happened in Calstock in 1862, as far as we know. Nor in Cornwall for that matter. The most interesting news - for those who could read - was contained in newspaper reports of the American Civil War. In Cornwall, body-snatchers were busy in St ives; a bal-maiden was crushed by mine machinery at South Caradon; some 30 houses, shops and tenements were destroyed by a fire in Falmouth; a fair was held at Callington on 24 July; a man was hanged at Bodmin Jail (the last public hanging in Cornwall); and a 40-foot

whale was trapped on rocks near Veryan, where its struggles to escape tore its flesh and filled the sea with blood.

Not much may have happened in Ann's life. Certainly there can have been nothing, and no one, to keep her in Cornwall. Possibily such letters that were penned by friends or cousins in Australia may have .set her dreaming. Those who wrote home generally praised their new home: 'Bless God, we are in a land of plenty, and it is a very fine country... You may buye land at 55 shillings a acre, up the country... Shoes is cheap hear, it is a good place for trade' - 'We pay eight shillings a week rent, but it is well we get on. Oh what a difference there is between this country and Home for poor folks' - 'It wants persons to be active, enterprising and industrious to get on here. Some do very well indeed' -'Here is the place to live. The dogs have got more beef and mutton than ever we could get in England; if you could see how we are living you would not stop home a day'.

Women were also in short supply, far outnumbered by men, and might expect not only to marry, but marry the man of their choice.

For whatever reason, Ann said her goodbyes to family and friends, none of whom would she expect to see again, and embarked on the Clara. She arrived in Melbourne on 28 April 1863, after a fairly fast run of 87 days, and three weeks after her 26th birthday. Eliza Glasson and Mary Jane Ennor followed after.

We next hear of Ann in 1867, when she married a miner, Richard Stevens, at Clunes, north of Ballarat, where gold had been discovered in June 1851. They married on 16 February in the simple Wesleyan church there: she was 29, he 28; the witnesses were her sister Mary Jane Ennor, now 37, and her husband John. All four sign the register. Mary Jane must have learned to write since her wedding (in 1850), as she had signed her marriage certificate with an X

So Ann at last had gained a husband and a home. And when she wrote to Calstock to tell her younger sisters so, did her letter move two of them to visit the shipping agent now established there? It seems so. Such a letter would have reached Cornwall in May, and in September, Eliza and Louisa Honeycombe set out for Australia from Plymouth.

At the time of Ann's departure from England (in February 1863) her four younger sisters - Hannah, Eliza, Louisa and Harriet - were respectively 23, 21, 19, and 13, the three older ones being bal-maidens.

Their brother Samuel was 15. We cannot be sure of this Eliza's exact age, for no record has been found of her birth, as in the case of her older brother, William. But the Censuses name her, and she later appears in Bendigo.

The death of their mother as well as Ann's departure appears to have unsettled the family and loosened some constraints. For in 1864, both Hannah and Louisa became pregnant. Both of them conceived around March that year, and although this may have been a coincidence, it suggests that the men who

fathered their children were met at a similar lime or place. It could have been on an outing to Plymouth the previous summer, or when some group of young men, perhaps even soldiers, turned up in Calstock on a pleasure trip.

Such an event happened in August 1864, when officers and men of the 2nd Queens Own Regiment sailed upriver on a chartered steamer to Calstock, and spent part of the time there playing cricket, football and quoits, among other pursuits. Other regiments used to make similar trips - 'spacious rooms being engaged at Calstock to feed the troops.'

And who cooked for them and served them? Who better than the better sort of bal-maiden, the good girls who regularly attended services at the Wesleyan Chapel?

It was not, however, a good time to visit Calstock. For 'an uncommon degree of mortality,' according to The West Briton of 19 August 1864, had smitten the town.

The paper remarked: 'Our obituary contains the death of the infant son of the esteemed rector, the Rev FT Batchelor, being the third son the rev gentleman has lost within the last seven weeks. A miner has also recently lost four daughters. Several persons have each lost two children. A miner, named Allen, lost three daughters on Monday last... No less than 16 children have been buried already during the present month. During the last month there were 25 funerals, and there have been more than 150 deaths in the parish this year, although the population is only about 7,500.' The situation had been made worse according to the paper, by the heat and a scarcity of water.

The cause of these deaths was attributed to 'a malignant fever', and the rector of Calstock, after burying his third son, refused to allow any other bodies to be brought into the church, 'fearing that otherwise the infection might spread among the congregation.'

Death was in the air, it seemed, and that autumn it smote the Honeycombes in Middle Dimson.

On 3 October 1864 Louisa gave birth to a baby girl, who was called Ann, doubtless in memory of Louisa's doubly departed mother and sister. Unusually, the father's name, George Moreton, is given on the birth certificate, the information provided by Louisa herself in November; she makes a mark. Who was he? A local man, or a visitor?

Bom at Dimson, presumably in the family home, the baby died of atrophy, or wasting away, less than three weeks later. Eliza was present at the baby's death and made her mark on the death certificate.

A month later, Hannah bave birth to a baby girl, whom she called, with some aspirations to gentility, Araminta Ellen. Born at Gunnislake on 20 November 1864, the baby died in March the following year, again the cause was atrophy. This time Louisa was present. There is no mention of Eliza Glasson, the oldest sister, who was living next door in 1861 - another indication that she had emigrated by then.

Were these babies of Hannah and Louisa the products of love, lust or ignorance? Or the forced attentions of some drunken miner? Or mistakes in the

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Nonetheless the births and deaths of their babies must have soured the lives of Hannah and Louisa, if not their reputations. In 1865, despite the excitement of a royal visit to Cornwall (that of the Prince and Princess of Wales, who had married in March 1863) the West was in the depths of a mining depression, although Gunnislake Mine had been restarted and all the other local mines were still in production. But in September 1865, The West Briton noted that: 'Employment is more difficult to obtain, emigration is going on upon a scale hitherto unprecedented... Trade is falling off by degrees, and credit is considerably dearer.' A cattle plague and a great gale struck the country in November and there were various miners' walk-outs and strikes.

In 1866 some 7,000 miners left Cornwall, and the suffering of those who remained increased; women walked for miles to apply for parish assistance.

In August 1867 The West Briton commented: 'Many familes are reported to be without under-clothing, sleeping upon straw, and living upon coarse dry bread... In the coming winter there must be very severe distress and great destitution.'

It was a winter Eliza and Louisa Honeycombe never saw. In September they stepped on board the Canterbury, which had sailed from London on 25 August and stopped at Plymouth to pick up more passengers, before sailing south to Cape Town and across the Indian Ocean to Australia.

Before embarkation they would have spent a few days at the Plymouth depot, where assisted emigrants were lodged and fed, free of charge. It was called the Emigrants' Home - 'a commodious building, situate at the Baltic Wharf... capable of affording shelter and a temporary home for no less than 700 emigrants.' There was also a 'Ladies Female Emigrant Society', under the patronage of the Countess of Mount Edgcumbe, which advised and instructed female passengers on what to take and expect, and distributed 'employment amongst them to wile away their time during the long and tedious voyage.'

When the Canterbury arrived at Plymouth, there would have been a delay of a few days while the health of all the emigrants was checked. They would then have been rowed out to the ship at anchor. Once on board, Eliza and Louisa would have found themselves crammed into the rear of the ship with all the other single women, supervised by a matron.

The best account of a departure from Plymouth was written by an artist -John Prout, who emigrated on the Royal Sovereign in 1840 with his wife and seven children in steerage.

He wrote: 'About eight o'clock in the evening we left Plymouth; the sun had set peacefully; the new moon, red with the hues of evening, hung just over Mount Edgecombe... It appeared impossible that causes to make man unhappy

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How must Eliza and Louisa have wept as the land grew smaller and smaller behind them until they could see it no more.

They reached Hobson's Bay, (Melbourne) on 19 December. The bay on which Port Phillip stood was so named after the naval commander, William Hobson, who surveyed the harbour of the new colony and helped to plan the town's layout. Hobson later claimed New Zealand for Britain, became its Governor and established the capital at Auckland.

The Canterbury's passenger list notes that the two women were Church of England, could read and write (none of which was correct), and had been engaged in general service for three years. Louisa was employed by a Sec Collier in Autumn, and Eliza by a James Arkendale in Bellerine.

In time they would have met up with their married sisters in Clunes, Mary Jane Ennor and Ann, now Mrs Stevens. And no doubt the three of them got together again for Louisa's marriage. Maybe Eliza Glasson was also there.

That wedding took place in Clunes on 3 May 1869. The bride was now calling herself, rather grandly, Louisa Ellen Williams Honeycombe. She was 25 and still a domestic servant. Her husband was a miner, James Henry Gribble, aged 29; he was a widower, his first wife having died in August 1867. They were married at the home of Ann and Richard Stevens, in accordance with the rites of the Bible Christian Church. Both Ann and Louisa made their marks on the marriage certificate - which is odd, as Ann had apparently signed her own marriage certificate two years earlier.

This happy news would have reached those who were left behind in Calstock in August 1869.

By this time Samuel had also apparently married, although no record of this has been found. For when he marries again later on in Australia, he describes himself as a widower, and gives the date of his first wife's death as 14 December 1869, when he was 22.

Who was she? When did they marry , and where, and how did she die? Did she die in child-birth? She was probably younger than Samuel, 20 or 21 perhaps, and the tragedy of her death may well have prompted his eventual departure from Cornwall.

Of this, again, we have no record. But according to his death certificate, which states that he had been in Australia for 29 years, he emigrated in 1873.

Harriet having married by then, old Will, their father was left in the care of Hannah. When he died, in November 1874, it was perhaps too late for Hannah to join her four sisters and Samuel in Australia; she was 35.

Again, no record has been found of her death. Did she marry after all? Or die obscurely and alone? Hannah Honeycombe disappears from view, as do all her married sisters: Harriet Welch in Devon or Cornwall, and Mary Jane Ennor, Ann Stevens, Louisa Gribble and Elizabeth Glasson in Australia, swallowed up in the shanty towns of the great Victorian, gold-rush.

Their descendants, one hopes, live and thrive today in moderate affluence - in Melbourne, or Clunes, or Ballarat - ignorant of the griefs and joys of their Cornish great-grandmothers, the Honeycombe sisters, in mid-Victorian England. There is, however, a postscript of a sort to the story of Eliza Glasson, whose surname at least will for ever be perpetuated in Australian criminal history. For there were Glassons (all were probably related) in New South Wales in the 1880s, and one of them, in 1893, slaughtered two people with a tomahawk.

It happened in a pretty, English-looking village called Carcoar, set in the rolling green hills and pastures west of the Blue Mountains.

In the early hours of 24 September 1893, a local bank manager, John Phillips, and a visiting family friend, Fanny Cavanagh, were brutally murdered by an intruder. The family lived above the bank. Mrs Phillips was seriously injured, struck in the face by the tomahawk or hatchet, and two of her baby's fingers were sliced off. The assailant was a crazy young man, newly married and desperate for money. He was arrested in a barber's shop in Cowra eleven hours after the murders. Mrs Phillips and two other women in the house, had recognised him. His name was Herbert (or Hubert) Edwin Glasson.

Known as Bertie, he was 25, the owner of a butcher's shop in Carcoar, and one of the five sons of a local pastoralist, Henry Glasson, who had emigrated in about 1861. Henry Glasson had died in 1891, aged 64; so he was spared the spectacle of the sensational trial of his son at Bathurst in October -and his subsequent death by hanging, despite a strong plea of insanity. Bertie's mother was said at the time to be mentally ill, as were some of her relations living in Cornwall.

It is not unlikely that our Eliza Glasson's miner husband, Charles, was related to Henry Glasson. Perhaps they were cousins, if not actually brothers.

Oddly enough, Charles Glasson died two months after the murders, aged 74, in December 1893. Born in Cornwall about 1819, he was the son of Richard and Mary Glasson. A Richard Glasson, said to be 'a very old magistrate' is mentioned in the Sydney Morning Herald's accounts of the murders. The paper is not clear about his relationship to Henry or Bertie Glasson, or whether this Richard was still alive in 1893. Nor do we know whether he was Charles' father. More research is needed to establsh the various Glasson family's connections. But is seems more than likely that all were closely related at this time. Interestingly, the second son born to Charles and Eliza Glasson in Australia was christened Henry. After his uncle?

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Eliza was 66 in 1893, and doubless wished that her married surname was other than that of the murderer, Bertie Glasson, whose crime became headlines throughout Australia at the end of that year.

Curiously, another Glasson had made the headlines in Cornwall 30 years before the Carcoar murders.

The West Briton of 19 June 1863, relates the case of Samuel Glasson, alias 'The Ferret', a blacksmith in Truro, who was fined ten shillings with costs for being drunk and disorderly in the streets at night, and sentenced to seven days' hard labour. The paper adds: 'He has, it is believed, been committed to gaol a greater number of times than any other man in Cornwall, having eaten no less than 31 Christmas dinners there, and served in gaol upwards of 11 years of his life'. In every case he was jailed for breaches of the peace and assaults on the police.

Coincidentally, there were Glassons in Kalgoorlie in the last years of John Honeycombe, goldminer, who died there in 1922. And a William Henry Glasson died in Bendigo in 1894, aged 54, the son of Thomas Glasson and Jane Mitchell, at a time when Sam and Martha Mitchell Honeycombe were living there.

But what now of this Samuel, and Eliza Honeycombe, Elizabeth Glasson's younger brother and sister?

Both of them emigrated as we know - Eliza in 1867 and Sam a few years later - and both of them ended up in Bendigo, which by 1890 had become one of the liveliest and largest of the colony's new towns.

Samuel emigrated, as the records suggest, when he was 26. More than likely he lived for a time in Victoria with one or other of his married sisters. As we find both him and Eliza at Long Gully in Bendigo later on, it is very possible that he lodged for a while, before his second marriage, with her, his older unmarried sister.

Born about 1842, Eliza was seven years or so older than he. Nonetheless, we have no exact knowledge of her whereabouts after she arrives in Australia (in 1867). We do know, however, that she, like two of her sisters, gave birth to a bastard child. Eliza's baby was born in the Lying-in Hospital in Melbourne on 23 May 1878 and was called Louisa Ann. Eliza was about 36. The baby was fostered out or died, as we do not hear of her again. We next hear of Eliza 15 years later, in 1893, in Bendigo.