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

I first heard about the union of Richard and Elizabeth from one of their grandsons, Charles Regelsen, who shakily wrote to me in April 1972, when he was 85.

He said: 'How they married is remarkable. The Ryder people lived in the North of England a few miles from Gretna Green. One day was a great day, and Elizabeth Ryder, aged 19, wanted to see the anvil over which couples were wed. Richard Honeycombe 14, then boarding with the Ryders, offered his escort. Accepted. They got there. The names of those wed that day were put on a

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Legend has made the couple younger than the^ were, but the age difference was actually greater. Richard's 18th birthday had only recently occured - he was baptised on 26 September 1829 - and Elizabeth was actually 25. She was born in Carlisle in March 1822. The fact that the Gretna wedding took place on the anniversary of Richard's baptism (on 26 September 1847) can hardly be a coincidence. Perhaps Richard viewed that date as his birthday. However, there is some uncertainty about the date, as although the big family bible records the marriage as having taken place on 27 September, the Gretna certificate is dated the 26th. But it did take place, and no doubt Elizabeth's parents were more than amazed.

Another legend claims it was she who dared the tiny teenage apprentice into writing their names on the blackboard. Bold girll And she was bigger than him! But she was getting on (she was 25) and may have resourcefully seized this opportunity to save herself from being left on the shelf.

Gretna Green was a small village some nine miles north of Carlisle and across the border in Scotland. Its popularity as a place for clandestine or runaway weddings dated from 1754, when the English Marriage Act decreed that only registered church weddings were legal and that persons under the age of 21 could not marry without parental consent - a law that endured until 1970, when the age limit was lowered to 18. As Scottish law allowed persons aged 16, or sometimes less, to marry, many young couples eloped thither to wed. Not all were heiresses or young. In 1816 the Lord Chancellor, Lord Erskine, aged 66 and disguised as an old lady to avoid detection, wed his mistress at Gretna Green. Another Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham (who had also got married there) legislated in 1856 (perhaps regretting his folly) that couples should reside in Scotland for three weeks before they could wed.

Richard and Elizabeth were married 'agreeable to the laws of Scotland' as their certificate states - by John Linton, who was not a blacksmith, as traditionally supposed, but a self-proclaimed priest. In 1825, grasping a golden opportunity, he had turned the rundown Gretna Hall into a modest hotel and marriage centre, where he performed more than a thousand marriages before his death in 1851. He provided Richard and his bride with a showy certificate, headed Kingdom of Scotland. Both signed their names as 'witnesses' - as did Mr Linton and his wife.

Once Elizabeth's parents had ceased to be amazed at her sudden union with the 18-year-old stonemason, a church wedding soon followed - no doubt at Mr and Mrs Ryder's insistence. This second ceremony, which was attended by Richard's older brother, William Robert, a 20-year-old carpenter, who must have been working in the area at the time, took place in a church in Carlisle on 13 November 1847.

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Interestingly, this date is not the one given in the family bible for the marriage, which places it in September. Clearly the Gretna date meant the most to the couple concerned.

Richard and Elizabeth then moved south and back to England, to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where their second child, another girl, was born on 28 January 1851. She was called Mary Ann, but known in later life as Annie. She was baptised at Newcastle's All Saints church in March; the family were then living in Carliol Street. Richard was probably employed as an itinerant stonemason in the construction of some public building. He could have been employed in 1851 on the construction of the High Level Bridge across the River Tyne, which would complete the rail link between London and Edinburgh. The presence, years later, in the house of his youngest daughter, Louisa, of a large oil painting of Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, seat of two Dukes of Northumberland for several centuries, seems to indicate that Richard may have worked for a time on the restoration of that Castle, which commenced after the accession of the fourth duke in 1847.

Richard's parents and their four youngest children had emigrated from Liverpool on the Sea Queen on 27 January 1850, a year before the birth of Mary Ann. We will never know why he decided to follow his parents to Australia. Presumably his father, and possibly others, wrote glowing accounts of well-paid job possibilities and a far better lifestyle. He may indeed have responded to some advertisement specifically asking for stonemasons to come to Australia to work, and his daughter, Louisa, would tell her grand-daughter many years later that her father was 'brought out to work on the building of the Victorian Government House' in Melbourne. According to the aforesaid Charles Regelsen, Richard also worked on the construction of the Princes Bridge across the Yarra River - the present bridge was completed in 1888.

Certainly an era of extensive civic building had begun in Melbourne just before the ship carrying Richard and his family docked at Geelong in September 1853. But why go to Geelong if Richard had been hired to work in Melbourne? The likely reason for this was that his father and his younger brothers and sisters were already there - with or without his father's second wife - and could provide a base and perhaps a home, as well as the best advice.

His departure from England was probably delayed by his wife's third pregnancy and by the difficulty of finding a suitable ship and acceptable fares. But on 3 February 1853 Elizabeth gave birth to their first son, who was conventionally christened George William (borrowing both his grandfathers' first names). He was born in Leith, Edinburgh's port on the Firth of Forth?

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But how she must have wept when saying her various goodbyes, and how dismal the long train journey south, taking her and her three little children, including a three-month-old baby, away from Scotland to the west-coast English seaport of Liverpool.

They sailed on a ship called the Banker's Daughter on 19 May 1853. Weighing over 1,000 tons, she carried 380 emigrants, a third of them single women aged between 14 and 45. The Honeycombes travelled steerage, enduring similar discomforts and privations to those suffered by William's family and then by Jane. Eight passengers died on this voyage, and when the Banker's_Daughter anchored at Point Henry on 3 September, after 107 days at sea (the fastest voyage ever made by a sailing-ship, 63 days, was made the following year), the ship was quarantined for five days on account of some fever on board.

Measles and typhus were the main killer diseases then on ships. Ill-fed and ill-housed, emigrants also had to contend with the fear, sometimes made terrible reality, of shipwreck, icebergs, storms and fire. Most of them had suffered hardships all their lives, but those they experienced at sea were more intense and with little relief. Of the 15,477 people who left England for Victoria in 1852 - with as many as 800 on some ships crammed on two decks below -about five per cent (849) died at sea. Comparatively few died in shipwrecks -although in the 60 years of mass emigration, from 1830 to 1890, about 30 emigrant ships were wrecked and over 2,500 people were drowned.

The worst wreck, with the most fatalities, was that of the Cataragui in August 1845. It still remains the worst civilian disaster in Australia's history. The ship struck King Island, north of Tasmania, on a stormy night. Nine people got ashore - 399 died.
Interestingly, the word 'emigrant' was initially applied to those whose voyage out was sponsored by the British government. Those who paid lor their passage, like the Honeycombes, disliked being lumped together with such poor and deprived persons as 'emigrants'.

Richard Honeycombe had his 24th birthday a few weeks after he stepped ashore at Geelong. His eldest daughter was nearly five; the next was two; his baby son, George, who had been born three months before the ship left Liverpool, was now seven months old. His wife, Elizabeth, was 31. Their ages on the shipping list are all incorrect: Richard was said to be 32. But the list correctly notes that he was a mason and came from Devon, where he was born.

Although we know that Richard and his family arrived in Geelong in September 1853, at the start of the Australian spring and two weeks or so before

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The dispute was not centred on money. For the masons and carpenters received a higher than average daily wage. They earned almost twice as much (about 16 shillings) as railway workers, who were paid between 9 and 10 shillings per day.

The Stonemasons Society in Melbourne was headed by James Stephens (president) and James Galloway (secretary). Stephens was Welsh, and had emigrated in 1853 when he was 32. He was a Chartist and trade unionist, as was Galloway, who emigrated from Fife in Scotland in 1854, aged 26, and died six years later. Another influential figure was a another Scot and Chartist, Charles Jardine Don, a former hand-loom weaver, aged 33, who had founded one of the earliest Mutual Improvement Societies in the UK and emigrated in 1853. Six years later he became Australia's first Labour MP.

Did Don and Stephens and other disaffected Chartists voyage to Australia on the same ship as Richard Honeycombe? What influence did their strong convictions have on him? Or was he already of their thinking, and only needed their leadership and example, as with other masons, to become as militant as they?

The Victorian Stonemasons Society, numbering about 250, was reformed in March 1856 and a 12-man committee (which did not include our Richard) was authorised to prosecute the eight-hour campaign and bring it to a successful conclusion. The employers were consulted and a mass public meeting of employers and those they employed in all the building trades (masons, carpenter, joiners, bricklayers, slaters, and sawyers) was held in the old Queen's Theatre, Queen Street on 26 March 1856. The Age said: 'The theatre was completely filled in every part and presented a most animated appearance.' The meeting was chaired by a contractor, James Linacre. Great applause greeted James Galloway's motion, carried unanimously, 'that the principle (of the eight-hour day) take effect from 21 April'.

Other trades met thereafter to form themselves into organised societies or unions, with the aim, as with the new Carpenters' and Joiners' Progressive Society, formed on 1 April, 'to establish unity of feeling and action in the great movements which will tend to advance their intellectual and moral improvement'.

The employers, although reluctant to concede shorter hours for their construction workers were not actively opposed to an eight-hour day, although more workers would have to be employed to achieve the same amount of work.

Manning Clark's A History of Australia tells what happened next.

"On 11 April seven hundred members of the mechanical trades crowded into the Queen's Theatre in Melbourne to discuss the expediency and practicability of abridging the hours of labour to eight hours a day. Dr Thomas

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'All the speakers were obsessed with the morals of the workers. In moving the abridgement of the hours of labour to eight hours per day, Mr Burt urged them not to lower themselves by dissipation. He hoped and believed that the workers who got drunk in England would be steady and sober here, and save, so that they might have time and the material means to cultivate their intellects and improve their morals. Then there would be no danger of workers abusing their extra leisure hours; nor would there be antagonism between master and man, but rather collaboration... Now it was known that this was no trade union combination to raise the rate of wages; the workers would find that they could have all the wise and good men to help them. Not all the employers were prepared to collaborate in these displays of good will and go hand in hand with the tradesmen. When the contractor for the building of Parliament House in Melbourne refused to abridge the hours of labour to eight per day on 21 April 1856, the stonemasons on the university building downed tools and marched to Parliament House. There, having been joined by other tradesmen, they resolved not to work for employers who did not accept the eight-hour day.'

James Stephens later said of that day: 'A majority of the members being at work at the building of the Melbourne University, where I had also been employed and which had been officially opened in March the previous year. I called a meeting during the 'Smoko' time, viz, between 10 and 11 o'clock in the forenoon, and reported our interviews with the employers - that Mr Cornish, contractor for the Parliament House, would not give in. I then insisted that the resolution of the Society should be carried by physical'force if necessary. The majority of masons employed are Society men, and we can easily coerce the minority. It was a burning hot day, and I thought the occasion a good one. So I called upon the men to follow me, to which they immediately consented - when I marched them to a new building then being erected in Madeline Street, thence to Temple Court, and on to the Parliament House, the men at all these works immediately dropping their tools and joining the procession.'

Over a thousand workers were involved in this lengthy march, which concluded at the Belvedere Hotel, in what is now Eastern Hill, where a meeting resolved not to return to work until the recalcitrant contractors (there were in fact two) accepted the principle of the eight-hour day. This they did, and the workers' triumph was celebrated by them and their families at the Cremorne Gardens on

12 May with festivities that included dancing, fireworks, and platefuls of plum pudding and roast beef. The march became an annual event and is celebrated now by Australia's Labour Day.

Did Richard Honeycombe at the age of 26, take part in the masons' march as he would aver 60 years later? Was he actually in Melbourne then?

Let us refer back to his letter written when he was 87, long after the events of 1856, and when corroboration was difficult and nearly all his contemporaries dead. He is wrong about the direction of Stephens' march, which ended at the Belvedere Hotel; and the festivities at the Cremorne Gardens took place the following month. He admits he never joined the Association, explaining, very vaguely, that it was not 'convenient' at the time. And yet he claims he helped 'to fight the eight hours agitation to the finish'.

No records of the events that year, or of trade union affairs thereafter, ever mention his name. And two of the newspaper obituaries recording his death as 'one of the last of the Eight Hours movement pioneers', also note that he 'did not walk in the original Eight Hours' Procession' and that his name was not 'enrolled on the scroll of honour at the Trades Hall'.

It seems to me that Dirty Dick was not only lying about his involvement in the march and union activities in 1856, but that he was not even in Melbourne at the time - despite what his daughter, Louisa, said about her father being 'brought out to work on the building of the Victorian Government House'. Louisa was the youngest of Richard's nine children and was not born until the end of 1885. By 'Government House' she must have meant what she is reported to have said -not Parliament House, part of which was built of brick in 1856, though the rest of it, including the west facade, was not completed untiM 892.

The first Government House was a prefabricated wooden house, like a Swiss chalet, occupied by Charles La Trobe in 1840. This 'cottage' was situated in Agnes Street, Jolimont, and restored in 1964. The second was the already existing home of a wealthy merchant. Called Toorak, it was leased by the government and enlarged at enormous expense, a barracks, new stables, coach-houses, driveways and other building's being added to the place at a cost of £29,000. It was occupied by Sir Charles Hotham in June 1854. Italianate in style, the house, on St George's Road, Toorak, was the home of five successive Governors, until it was relinquished and sold. The third Government House, the present one, was built in the Domain, south of the Yarra River, in 1874. With bluestone foundations, it was modelled in part on Queen Victoria's palatial Italianate home on the Isle of Wight, Osborne House, and cost, with its furnishings, nearly £145,000.

Richard, who specialised in bluestone, might well have been employed in 1874 on shaping masonry for this house - and not the first two, as both existed before he came to Australia. And when Charles Regelsen refers to Richard's involvement with the building of the Princes Bridge, he could not in fact have meant the first bluestone and granite bridge, begun in 1850, but the second, completed in 1886.

The fact remains that Richard and his family disembarked at and settled in Geelong, not Melbourne, and that six of his children were born in Geelong, between 1855 and 1865. A great deal of building in stone was taking place at this time (the Geelong Town Hall was completed in 1855), and Richard had no need to seek work in Melbourne. He may have left his family in Geelong while he was employed on some special project in Melbourne - but this is unlikely. Families clung together then out of mutual need and dependency. And if he was ever at work in Melbourne, his wife and children would normally have accompanied him. It was her duty to keep house for him, to serve and feed him and to be bedded by him. He would expect no less.

Richard Honeycombe's presence in Melbourne is not in fact recorded in street directories until 1877 - although he was probably there in 1876, if not before. It may not be until then that he became active in trade union affairs in Melbourne and began attending every procession and march honouring the masons' march.

30 years later he may well have felt as if he were almost a pioneer - and who could or would refute him if he said he was?

Richard in Stinkopolis

After living in Noble Street, Geelong, Richard and his family moved to Queens St in 1859, to a suburb called Kildare. His sixth child and third son, Thomas, was bom there on 15 September 1859. Elizabeth was still claiming to be three years (and not seven years) older than her husband, who was 30 a fortnight after Thomas's birth. Three weeks later, Richard's 19-year-old sister, Martha, gave birth to an illegitimate baby boy, the father being an Irish farmer old enough to be her father. Although she married him two years later, Martha's indiscretion must have earned the disapproval of her brother Dick - who little knew then that one of his daughters would also be as indiscreet.

The following year (1860) Richard's younger brother, Henry, aged 24, died in hospital of Bright's Disease, in Geelong. Both brothers were stonemasons, like their father, and both were presumably employed on the preparing of stones for municipal buildings, churches and more opulent homes. As Lawrence Mountjoy notified the registrar of Henry's death, it is probable that Henry had been living with his older sister and her husband and not at Richard's place. There seems to have been little family feeling between William the stonemason's sons, and certainly when Richard's next son was born in November 1861, Henry's name was not bestowed on him. Christened John Albert, he was later known as Jack.

Like Thomas, Jack was born in Queens St - as were Harriet (1863) and Louisa (1865) - after which Richard and Elizabeth's brood of nine was complete.

By this time Elizabeth, who must have been a very good and careful mother to have born and reared nine children without loss, was 43. She continued to care for them all in Queens St until 1870, when the whole family left Geelong and moved 35 km west to Winchelsea, where they remained for two years or so.

The move was probably determined by some particular building enterprise in that town, although it may have been prompted by the expanding ambitions and territories of the Mountjoys, whose Temperance Hotel in Lome was opened in 1868. As Winchelsea would not be joined to Geelong by the railways until late in 1876, Richard and his large family must have travelled thither by coach.

There is the possibility that Richard moved there earlier, as a new bluestone bridge across the Barwon River was constructed in 1869 - it was opened by Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh. A 42-room two-storey bluestone mansion in Barwon Park, belonging to Thomas Austin, was also built in 1869.

It was Mr Austin, a wealthy grazier, who later collected a consignment of fauna from the clipper Lightning to adorn his house and grounds. Among the domestic animals were 24 rabbits, which he released to play along the river. Play they did, and became a plague.

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The Honeycombes' stay in Winchelsea may have been curtailed by an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. For in Geeiong in June 1872, Richard's second daughter, Mary Ann, known as Annie, gave birth to a baby girl.