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

Nonetheless, the Mayor, James Cuming, jovial and bearded former farrier and bonemill owner, determined that the new citizens of Footscray would enjoy themselves, largely at his own expense. Ten special trains took 4,000 sweating schoolchildren, teachers, parents and friends to a picnic at Bacchus Marsh on a very hot day (100 F in the shade). 400 workmen - with Richard Honeycombe and his son Richard among them? - were then treated to a beer-swilling social. Finally, the English Governor of Victoria, Lord Hopetown, who was 30, was invited to lead a procession of dignitaries through the streets and then attend a civic banquet and ball, where he graciously, and tactfully, said: 'Many parts of Melbourne are attractive, such as Collins Street, and such aristocratic suburbs as St Kilda. But I would like to know where Collins Street and St Kilda would be, were it not for manufacturing districts like this? I might compare them to a tree with the roots cut away. The workers of the land form the foundation of a country's weal, and give life and prosperity to the whole.'

Loud cheers from corpulent, bearded factory owners greeted this remark: they were generally convinced that they and their workers had never had it so good. But there was a spectre at that feast that April night, whose face and presence would be fully seen and felt two years later.

On an April day in 1893, a woman hurried into a Yarraville shop. The bank's broke!' she cried and collapsed. A little girl, Gertie, who was there, wondered how a bank could break. So did many others when they heard that the Commercial Bank had closed. It was, according to local historian, John Lack, 'the nadir of a two-year plunge into the deepest depression in Victoria's history'.

Great Events in Australia's History succinctly describes how this came about.

The long boom which began with the gold rushes of the 1850's lasted nearly 40 years. In that time the population increased ninefold, and local industry began to meet half of Australia's demand for manufactured goods. More land than ever before went under cultivation, and innovations like wire fences, irrigation and improved machinery, ensured that it was better farmed. Large amounts of British Capital had come into the country to support an expansion of railway systems, a construction boom, and speculation in urban land and in the mining and pastoral industries... The boom ended in the late 1880's. A severe drought in 1888, coupled with overstocking on marginal lands, plagues of introduced pests [like rabbits] and plants, and a drop in the wool price, meant that the rural sector declined rapidly. More importantly, in 1889 British bankers ceased lending to Australia. Colonial governments drastically cut back spending on all public works, throwing thousands out of work. Although British funds represented no more than a third of deposits in the banks, these withdrawals sparked a panic as local investors rushed to withdraw their money. In Melbourne, the financial capital of Australia, the effects of the depression

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were most devastatingly felt. Eight banks closed; fortunes and life savings were lost... As the investment bubble burst, finance companies, that had encouraged overborrowing and frenzied speculation in real estate, collapsed. Factories and business houses closed... Unemployment soared to 25 percent among skilled workers and even higher among the unskilled. As no welfare system existed, other than soup kitchens to distribute food, the suffering and misery of the unemployed was profound. In the search for work men left for the Western Australian goldfields in tens of thousands... Strikes against failing wages and poor conditions ended in defeat. The trough of the depression was reached in 1893.'

The vicar of St John's, Henry Forde Scott, who had married Louisa Honeycombe, to William Allen in 1890, concluded in a sermon: 'Unwise government, feverish taste for riches, reckless and unremunerative expenditure, unwise action of Labour leaders, cruel criminality by trusted financiers - these resulted... in the poverty of today.'

How did Richard Honeycombe, his sons and daughters fare? As badly or perhaps better than the rest?

They all survived. But did Richard, 40 years after he and his young family left Liverpool, curse the day that they had come to Geelong, and then left Geelong for Melbourne? All that he had hoped for and worked for - through no fault of his own - was being dispossessed and destroyed. Poverty and deprivation, it must have seemed, would stay with him to his grave.

And then in 1894 his younger brother John descended on him with two of his sons, whom Richard had probably never seen. He had probably not seen his taller brother for 20 years. Now John was 52, more portly and well-dressed, with his one good eye and his one glass eye and two hungry sons: one called Willie and aged 15, the other 11 -year-old Bob.

Why had they come? Were they in Melbourne on a family visit, or was John looking for work? What work - in a Depression? One imagines that both brothers were relieved when John took himself and his sons off to Geelong, to see their Aunt Jane. Did they stay at Albert Street, waited on by Richard's wife, Elizabeth (now 72) and his spinster daughter, Jane? Or did they lodge in some boarding-house, or even - if John had some money to burn - in some comfortable hotel?

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Soon they were gone, and Richard would only see his brother once again,

Kalgoorlie gold-field a few years later. . ,

Neither of the brothers, as far as we know, nor Richard's sons, ventured to Kalgoorlie at this time, although thousands did, seeking their fortunes or some means of supporting the wives and children they left behind.

Western Australia had been in the news since 1885, when gold-strikes were made in the Kimberieys, then over the next six years at Yilgairn, Ashburton and Murchison. Then in 1892 Arthur Bayley returned to Southern Cross with over 15 kilograms of gold in his saddlebags, scoured from a site at Coolgardie. And the following year Paddy Hannan wandered into an area called 'Kalgurli' by aborigines, and picked up some nuggets of gold that lay at his feet.

Other news, apart from talk of Federation, and the flying experiments Lawrence Hargrave was making near Sydney with box-kites, included the amazing fact that South Australia, preceded by New Zealand, had given women the right to vote - something that would not happen fully in Britain until 1928.

This must have been amazing to Dirty Dick, who no doubt deplored such liberality and chose never to discuss the matter with his daughter or wife. How browbeaten they were by him we do not know. But Richard's wife, Elizabeth, who was some inches taller than him, clearly had some fight in her. Family legend has it that she used to fetch a billy-can of beer from a hotel and leave it cooling on a window ledge, so that on his return from work he could immediately quench his thirst. One day she was so displeased with him that she filled the billy with cough mixture and he drank the lot.

Women put up with a lot from their men in those days - they had no choice - and hard times must have made things even harder at home.

Ironically, it was at this time of extreme hardship in cities and towns that the romantic ballads of Andrew Barton (Banjo) Paterson were published by Angus & Robertson as The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses and became a huge and popular success. In that same year, 1895, Paterson, while in Queensland, wrote new words for an old song which was first heard in Winton as 'Waltzing Matilda'. The following year Angus & Robertson published the antidote, Henry Lawson's unromantic and uncompromising view of rural Australia contained in a collection of 52 short stories entitled While the Billy Boils.

Did Dirty Dick ever read Paterson's poems and Lawson's stories? We would like to think so. We know, because he wrote to The Age, that he was probably in the habit of perusing the papers in Albert Street. And what must have interested him then was any mention of South Africa.

For in 1895, when the Australian anthem of 'Waltzing Matilda' was being penned, two of Richard's sons decided to join a third in South Africa and (temporarily) stopped calling Australia home.

2} South Africa and the Boer War

Although three Honeycombes, brothers, were in South Africa in the 1890's and became embroiled in the Boer War, we know very little to nothing about exactly when they were there, where they lived and worked, and what happened to them during that war. Were it not for oral evidence, we would know next to nothing about this most interesting episode. For just one document has been unearthed to prove that one of the brothers, Dick, was in South Africa then. We have nothing to show that Tom and Jack were there - not until (in Jack's case) 1905.

Tom Honeycombe is said (by Aunt Lil) to have gone to South Africa in the depression to work and to have sent for his brothers Jack and Dick. She said: Thomas went over first. Then he sent for his brother, Jack. Dick went over later, I think... Thomas went over for work. There was no work here. There was a Depression. And they found out that there was work in Africa, and that's why they went over. There was plenty of work for stonemasons, and Dick stopped there for about f ve years. His son (my younger brother) was a baby when Richard left. I would have been two.' If so, Richard the father (Dick) must have left Australia at the end of 1896.

Tom seems to have travelled to South Africa in 1891 or 92, as the deepening depression spread and sank towards its nadir in 1893.

Although Melbourne directories name Tom as a householder in North Fitzroy in 1891; he was in Brunswick in 1892-93; in Clifton Hill in 1894; and in North Fitzroy between 1895 to 1898, this does not mean that he was actually in residence, only that he was the head of the household and that a property was rented in his name. His wife, Catherine, is listed as being the proprietor of a ham shop in North Fitzroy in 1897. But a ham and beef shop in North Carlton in 1899 is registered under Tom's name.

If Tom went to South Africa in 1891 he would have sailed from Melbourne to Cape Town.

It seems that only two ships did this specific journey in 1891 - the Damascus in March, and the Australasian in May - although other ships sailed to Cape Town from Sydney and Adelaide. There were 52 passengers on the Damascus and 38 on the Australasian. But we will never know if Tom was on either, or none, of these ships, as shipping registers at the Cape only listed the names of first-class passengers and merely noted the numbers of those in steerage. Moreover, as Tom and his brothers were British citizens, they would have been allowed free entry into South Africa (another British colony) and no official records of their entry, or exit, will exist.

Tom would not have lingered in Cape Town but, as with most other Australian immigrants, would have made his way, partly by train, to

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Johannesburg in the Transvaal. And as both his brothers are associated with Johannesburg, it seems likely that Tom, the first of them to cross the Indian Ocean, also settled there.

What led Tom to South Africa? Was there some friend or relative who had gone before? Or was he responding to some compelling advertisement in a Melbourne paper for men to work in the South African gold and diamond mines, or to assist in the building of their cities in stone? Gold and diamonds had been found in increasing quantities since the 1860's But it was not until March 1886 that a part-time prospector struck lucky on an outcrop of the gold-bearing reef of the Witwatersrand (Ridge of White Waters) and sparked the greatest gold rush ever known.

Curiously, the discoverer was an Australian digger, called George Harrison - a stonemason by trade. He had been employed to help renovate a homestead on a widow's farm and spent his spare time fossicking about the wind-swept veld. The Witwatersrand was almost 6,000 feet above sea-level, on a high plateau, which provided the future city with a fine climate, crisp and generally dry. Pretoria, when built 35 miles to the north, was off that plateau and 1,600 feet lower down.

Harrison, chipping away on a likely outcrop, picked up a piece of rock which, when crushed and panned in a kitchen basin in the farmhouse, revealed a gleaming golden tail. He had a contract with the owner of the land, GC Oosthuizen, who wrote to the Afrikaner president of the Transvaal, Paul Kruger, saying that payable gold had been found on his farm, and Harrison himself was persuaded to visit Kruger in July 1886 to confirm this fact. But it was not until September that the area was declared a goldfield. A tent village sprang up and spread along the outcrop, and a site for a town was chosen nearby. It was named Johannesburg, after the two commissioners, both called Johannes, who had confirmed Harrison's discovery. His name is commemorated by a city street and a park.

President Kruger visited the township in February 1887. It was then run by a Diggers' Committee, who raised a triumphal arch for the occasion, sent a troop of horsemen to meet and greet him and accompany him into the ramshackle hamlet, where he was hailed in a series of formal speeches. By this time Harrison had sold his claim, for a mere 20 rand, and moved on, leaving others to reap what became the richest harvest in the world. Within four years the field had produced 650,000 ounces of gold, worth over 90 million rand at today's values, and Johannesburg had become the biggest, brashest and wealthiest town in South Africa. It is still the biggest today, its built-up area now spreading for 100 km east and west.

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Although thousands of gold-miners continued to exist in tents, shacks and squalid conditions among the hundreds of holes being dug into the Witwatersrand - and although their activities and the non-stop movement of wagons laden with mining equipment, food supplies and people continued to raise clouds of all-enveloping dust - a host of gamblers, con-men, entertainers, prostitutes and businessmen lived very well, eating and drinking to excess, in the ever-altering, noisy main thoroughfares, where buildings were erected, demolished and erected anew with astonishing rapidity. By the end of 1889, churches, stores, bars, businesses and homes stood where nothing had existed at the start of 1886. There was also a park, a market, a hospital, a stock exchange, and a Sanitary Board; and the first strike, in favour of a 48-hour week and pay increases, had occurred. Water was still scarce, however, as a private company controlled supplies, and hordes of horses, goats and oxen turned the surrounding countryside into a wasteland devoid of grass, whereon some starved and died.

Into this wildest of Wild West type towns, where men lit cigars with banknotes and women bathed in champagne, came Tom Honeycombe in or about 1891. What he did, or where and how he worked and lived we do not know. Presumably, like thousands of others, he staked a claim of his own, or tried to. It seems he abandoned his stonecutter's trade and was employed in a gold-mine, in diggings underground. For he contracted the miners' disease, phthisis, a kind of TB, and died of it within ten years.

In 1892 the town's population numbered some 15,000 whites and 6,700 natives, while 2,700 whites and nearly 26,000 natives worked on the adjacent goldfields. The following year three-storey buildings were being erected, tramways laid, roads macadamized and streets lit by electricity as well as by gas. By the middle of the 1890's 200 mining companies had offices in the town, the biggest and richest of these being Crown Mines and Rand Mines, and Consolidated Goldfields of South Africa, which was run by Charles Rudd and Cecil Rhodes.

Rhodes, the fifth son of an English clergyman, had come to South Africa, to Natal in 1870 aged 17, to build up his health: he had TB. He built a business empire instead, forming the De Beers Mining Company, dealing in diamonds, first of all. Other companies followed, influencing many aspects of South Africa's (and Rhodesia's) economy and growth. He became an MP and then prime minister of the Cape in 1890, when he was 37. From but one of his companies he drew a personal income in the mid 1890's of £300,000 a year.

Neither Tom, Dick nor Jack Honeycombe, who may well have worked for one of Cecil Rhodes' gold-mining concerns in Johannesburg, earned a thousandth of that vast sum, and there was every chance that they might be

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killed or injured in the mines. Men were expendable, white and black, and casualties were high.

Did Dick and Jack divert thither even briefly? Or did they sail doggedly on, drawn by better money prospects in the South African mines? Dick was 38 in 1895; Jack was 34. Dick, it seems, continued with his trade as a stonemason in Johannesburg; Jack the carpenter, it is said, made timber supports for the mines.

Jack's grandson, Ernie Lawless, speaking nearly 75 years after the event, told me the tale of Jack's departure from Melbourne, as he remembered it from what his mother had told him years ago.

He said; 'There was no work in Australia at the time... But some building contractor in Melbourne started up and Jack, who was a carpenter, said: "I'll go and get a job as a bricklayer." His wife said: "How can you get a job as a bricklayer? You don't know anything about it." He said: "Well, that's all they want." They didn't want any carpenters at that time. He worked for half a day and the boss said to him: "You're not a bricklayer. You're no good to us." And he was fired. He was out of work for quite a time. Then another firm started and wanted bricklayers, and this time he worked for them for a day before he was fired. The third time he got a job he lasted for two days. Then he was fired again. He couldn't get any work in Fitzroy, and when he read in the papers about gold being found in Johannesburg, and that all these mines wanted men who were carpenters, as well as other trades, he said to his wife: "I'm going over to South Africa to see if I can get work, and I'll send for you and the four children as soon as I've saved enough money." The boat he took arrived in Cape Town. It took him six weeks to get there. He got to Johannesburg on a goods train - he couldn't afford anything else. He got work in Johannesburg straightaway. They signed him on at one of the mines, at Krugersdorp, which is 20 miles from Johannesburg. He lined the shafts with timber, so that skips could go down on the rails. He was always a carpenter, and he always worked in or near Johannesburg.1

It seems - from what Ernie's wife then related - that Jack was in or near Johannesburg in February 1896, when a goods train carrying explosives, about 58 tons of dynamite, blew up. It was being unloaded in the marshalling-yards at Braamfontein, some two miles west of the city centre, when a shunting train collided with the stationery trucks. In the resulting explosion the dynamite train

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One of them was the grandmother of Ernie Lawless's wife. She was at home at the time. Her five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter (Mrs Lawless's mother) were away with their father, visiting, when the explosion occurred. The grandmother, Mrs Lena Defrey, was killed.

Jack was probably in Johannesburg during the Christmas holiday in 1896. Perhaps he met up with his brothers, Tom and Dick. And on Christmas Eve, together with those miners and other workers with a Cornish ancestry, they may have gathered outside the Grand National Hotel, on the corner of Rissik and Pritchard Streets, to hear the Cornish Choir sing seasonal English songs and carols on a first-floor balcony. All those in the street below would have joined in the singing, remembering times past and places in that cold green faraway land, and yearning for the company of absent families and friends.

Among them might not the three Honeycombe brothers have stood and sung? For had not their grandfather, William, been born in Cornwall, at Calstock? And did they not still consider England and Cornwall, though never seen by them, as home?

They were surely among the crowds that heard Fanny Moody-Manners sing a few weeks later. Dubbed the Cornish Nightingale, she had been specially invited to sail to South Africa to entertain her countrymen and women. Born in Redruth and now aged 30, she toured various towns and isolated mining communities, reaching Johannesburg, with her husband, in January 1897. Her diary tells the story of one of the greatest days in her life.

'When we arrived at the Park Station a perfect mob of people appeared to be waiting for us. They gave a hearty cheer when they saw me, and they also presented me with an illuminated address of welcome. Amongst the people there were many who I had known in my Redruth days, or who had at least known some member of my family. Indeed, it seemed as if every Rand man who had hailed from the rocky moorland, every Jack from Camborne or Redruth, every fisherman from Mount's Bay, and every reefman who claims the Duchy as his native heath, had made it his business to be on the platform that morning. Then we got into the carriage that was waiting for us and the horses were unyoked and replaced by a score or so of Cornishmen who dragged us to the Grand National Hotel, and this, mind you, in the noontide heat of a South African day.'

That night she sang for four hours at the Theatre Royal. Afterwards, the crowd of Cornishmen would not disperse; they followed her to the Grand National Hotel and waited outside - until the curtains of a balcony window opened and Fanny Moody-Manners stepped outside.

The Star described the scene: There was an assemblage of enthusiastic but strangely silent and peaceful Cornishmen; this congregation of robust Romeos waited for their Juliet to appear upon the balcony. It was a beautiful night, a starry night, and the star of the evening was not long in presenting