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

Why did she do it? What made Jack want to marry his niece? Was it love? Or was it a domestic arrangement that benefited them both?

Unfortunately, although I cautiously questioned Aunt Lil about this, among other matters, in Melbourne in 1987, she was reluctant to say anything about her life with Jack and became distressed, tearing at a handkerchief in her lap. And when questioned by Laurel Honeycombe at a later date, Lil said not much more.

She lived to be 101, and thus became the longest-lived and oldest Honeycombe in the world - surpassing my great-aunt, Emma, who lived to be 100 and 854 months, dying in July 1964. But Aunt Lil kept her secrets and all that she knew will never be made known now.

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Nor will we know what Lil's life with Jack was like, apart from the fact that he continued to be employed as a carpenter, doing odd jobs, until he was quite old, and that Lily did piece-work in a munitions factory during the Second World War. All we have are dates and places. From 1922 to 1937 they lived at 6 Argyle Street, Footscray. Then they were at 317A Barkley St during the Second World War, moving to 9 Wolverhampton Street, Footscray in 1953, where Jack died, on 4 July 1956, aged 94.9.

The move away from Argyle St was apparently caused by the failure of some business venture, and the house there had to be sold. The house in Wolverhampton St was rented from Shell Oil, and when the company wished to expand an adjacent service station, an old house with a corrugated iron roof was bought for Lil by Shell at 354 Barkly St, and she rented it for life, until she had to move out, unwillingly, and go to an old folk's home.

Jack's great-nephew, Arthur, remembers that the sprightly little old man, who wore glasses and smoked a pipe, followed the fortunes of Carlton Football Club and Test Cricket, and that at Argyle Street he kept chooks. Also, that he went to his father's funeral in 1925, and that at the wedding of Arthur's sister, Thelma, in 1949, old Jack Honeycombe danced.

Old Richard Honeycombe, who was 90 in September 1919, may not have been too concerned, or even interested, in the second marriage of his youngest son, Jack, and his grand-daughter Lil. The fact that the odd couple continued to live in Footscray seems to indicate there was insufficient family opprobrium or disapproval for them to move elsewhere. The earlier wedding of his grandson, young Dick, and Addie Thompson, may have been distinguished by his presence. For young Dick bore his forename and had lived in Footscray all his life; and the old man was still sufficiently mobile to get out and about - as we know from his attendance at events commemorating the anniversary of the masons' march.

It was in March 1916 that old Dick wrote to The Age, claiming to be 'the last of the 75 masons who marched from the Belvedere Hotel' and adding 'I did not join the Association it not being convenient at the time'.

His wife, Elizabeth, who was still alive then, would have known the truth or otherwise of this assertion. But by then she might not have been in a state to see or understand what was said. However, his eldest daughter, Jane, would have been able to support or refute her father's claim, as she was 7V4 in April

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Old Dick was indubitedly one of the oldest stonemasons in Australia, as well as a member of one of the oldest trade unions. His great age also gave him some distinction. And it was this that impressed a young boy who called on him in 1922.

Ernie Lawless was 10. His mother, Mrs Olive Lawless, eldest daughter of Jack Honeycombe and Jane, had married her husband, James Martin Lawless, at Durban in South Africa in May 1911. Jim Lawless served with the Rand Light Infantry in the First World War, after which he was employed by South African Railways. Born in London in November 1882, he had earlier served with the First Royal Dublin Fusiliers, enlisting in London in January 1897, when he was 14 years old and two months. He was a bugle boy and kept his silver bugle in its case for many years. In time he became a drum major. Young Jim went with the Fusiliers to South Africa to take part in the Boer War, and, according to the medals and decorations mentioned in his discharge certificate, the teenage Private Lawless was involved in the relief of Ladysmith in Natal in February 1900 and in General Buller's assault on the Boers at Laings Nek, also in Natal, in June. He was with the Fusiliers for five and a half years (nearly three abroad), buying himself out of the army (for £18) at Krugersdorp in October 1902, when he was nearly 20. His 'Description on Final Discharge' reveals him to have been 5'7", with a fair complexion, blue eyes and brown hair; his trade was that of a gardener. He had scars on his forehead and had lost most of his left little finger - perhaps in a battle. When he married Jack and Jane's eldest daughter in Durban in 1911, he was 28 and she was 27.

Olive Lawless had been 19 or so when she was summoned from Melbourne with her mother, sister and two brothers to join her father Jack in Johannesburg after the Boer War. Presumably it was in Johannesburg that she met her ex-Fusilier, Jim Lawless, when he was employed there on the railways. Presumably she also kept in touch with the Honeycombes and a friend or two in Footscray. For after an absence of nearly 20 years she decided to make a sentimental journey, by sea, and revisit the people and places she had known in her childhood and teen-age years. And she took her small son Ernie with her and her husband, Jim.

I only knew about this most interesting encounter between Jack's South African descendants and his Melbourne relations from a letter Ernie Lawless wrote to me in 1982.

He said: 'Yes, my mother was a Honeycombe, and when I was young we went to Australia and I met my great-grandfather who was 92 years of age then, and I have a photo of him and his wife.'

At the time I was not aware of the connections between the South African and Australian Honeycombes, nor who Ernie's great-grandfather was. And I didn't follow it up. But the great-grandfather was of course Dirty Dick, and if he was 92 when Ernie met him, then the trip must have been made after old

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Olive met her father, Jack, in Melbourne. But it seems that she never met Jack's second wife, Lil, and she probably kept the scandalous union to herself on her return to Johannesburg. For her two brothers' offspring apparently never knew the actual facts - only that Jack's second wife was 'a very young girl'.

If only Olive Lawless had left some record of that visit! What useful things it would have told us about the Footscray Honeycombes then - of Jack and Lil; of old Richard and his daughter, Jane; and possibly Fanny and Louie and Jessie, and young Dick's marriage to Addie Thompson a year or two ago.

But her son, Ernie, who had been a welder and boilermaker, did tell me something about that visit - although in 1982 I didn't realise its full and historic significance, and failed to question Ernie further. Nonetheless, he recalled some memories of that time and of his great-grandfather, that remarkable little old man known as Dirty Dick.

Ernie said: 'When we went to Australia in 1922 - my mother, father and myself - it was because my mother wanted to see her father, Jack. She said: "We must go. He's getting older". She said she'd probably never see him again - which was the truth. We were there for six months, as my father took six months' leave. We stayed in boarding-houses and with some relations. We went to Sydney onoe. The ship we were on going over was called the Commonwealth, P & O, and my grandfather, Jack, was there to meet us. He came to the boat. My mother said: "There's my father!" He was 60 then. We saw him a few times, but my mother didn't want to meet his second wife. She wouldn't go to his house. She just saw him. He came to see us at Auntie Jane's (Elizabeth Jane) or at Mary Ann's (Mary Ann Regelsen). We met them, but nobody else, I think. We went to a shop - one of them had a shop. Jack was living in Footscray then. He was a short man, looked like his father, with a biggish nose and no beard or whiskers. Auntie Jane was timid and quiet. The old man was living with her, with his daughter. His wife was dead. He was 92 when we were there... I remember a story they told about him. In his home there was a fireplace made of stone. He said it wasn't standing square - it was lop-sided. He said so to his daughter Jane. She said: "It's been like that for 50 years. How can you say such a thing?" One day they came home and found he'd knocked down the fireplace to make it square. He said he'd rebuild it, but he never did. So they had to get somebody in to rebuild the fireplace again in stone... I remember him sitting on the verandah of their house in Footscray, and my mother was also there, and my father. His sight wasn't so good. Somebody would walk past the front of the house and say: "Hallo, Dick!" And he'd say to my mother (he never wore glasses): "I can see a blur. But I can't see who it is. Who is it?" My mother would say: "That's so-and-so". Somebody that she knew. And he'd say: "Ah, hallo" - whatever the name was. And he smoked a pipe. I used to fill his pipe for him. He had a stick and stooped a bit. He never gave me any money... When we came back to Johannesburg from Australia, a lot of the buildings had been blown up in Mayfair, during the miners' strike in

1922. But we missed it all. We came back on the Border. It was quite cold. There were icebergs nearby. My mother corresponded with her father until he died. She sent him a photo - she sent him money. She was fond of him'.

When, years later, Olive wrote in 1944 to Jack that his grandson, Ernie, had become a freemason, Jack sent his masonic medal to Ernie in return.

So Ernie Lawless, and Olive and Jim, came to Australia in 1922, and went. As did the novelist, DH Lawrence, and his wife. They stayed at Thirroul, south of Sydney, in the winter of 1922. There, in a rented seaside bungalow, he wrote most of his odd Australian novel, Kangaroo.

What Lawrence thought of Australia is partly revealed in letters he wrote during his four-month stay, and presents us with an outsider's view of Australia and Australians at this time, albeit of New South Wales and Thirroul - a view that still holds true in part where first-time visitors are concerned.

He wrote: There is a great fascination in Australia... There is something so remote and far off and utterly indifferent to our European world, in the very air... I feel if I lived all my life in Australia I should never know anybody - though they are all very friendly. But one feels one doesn't want to talk to any of them. The people are so crude in their feelings - and they only want up-to-date "conveniences" - electric light and tramways and things like that. The aristocracy are the people who own big stores. Talk about crude self-satisfied... The working people are very discontented - always more strikes... It is rather like the Midlands of England, the life, very familiar and rough... The people are all very friendly, yet foreign to me... The tradesmen... are very unobtrusive. One nice thing... is that nobody asks questions... It's nice not to have to start explaining oneself... This is the most democratic place I have ever been in. And the more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric lights and water closets, and nothing else... They have good wages, they wear smart boots and the girls all have silk stockings; they fly round on ponies and buggies - sort of low one-horse traps - and in motor cars. They are all vaguely and meaninglessly on the go. And it seems so empty, so nothing... That's what the life in a new country does to you: it makes you so material, so outward, that your real inner self dies out, and you clatter round like so many mechanical animals... Yet they are very trustful and kind and quite competent in their jobs. There's no need to lock your doors, nobody will come and steal. Nobody is better than anybody else, and it really is democratic. But it all feels so slovenly, slip-shod, rootless, and empty, it is like a dream... Everything is so happy-go-lucky, and one couldn't fret about anything if one tried. One just doesn't care... Nothing really matters. But they let little things matter sufficiently to keep the whole show going... It is a weird place. In the established sense, it is socially nil... But also there seems to be no inside life of any sort: just a long lapse and drift... The country has an extraordinary hoary, weird attraction. As you get used to it, it seems so old, as if it... was coal age, the age of great ferus and mosses. It hasn't got a

consciousness - just none - too far back... There is great charm in Australia... The people are simple and easy-going and nice...'

It is to be doubted whether any of the Honeycombes had heard of DH Lawrence, or had read his books. But he was right about the strikes. There was a police strike in Melbourne in November 1923. As a result, on the Friday night before the Melbourne Cup, thousands ran riot in the city centre, pillaging the stores in Bourke Street and elsewhere; 237 people were injured in fights and as shop windows were smashed. None of the 636 policemen who went on strike was reinstated. Volunteers, mainly returned soldiers, stood guard in the city until new police recruits could be trained.

Lawrence was also right about the easy-going rather aimless society in which people lived; and he was right about their basic concerns with 'conveniences', with wages, transport, toilets, electric light and trams - things that made living easier still.

Trams began running in Footscray in September 1921, boosting property values, the building of new homes and shops and the spread of suburbia west and south. Tramways also helped to focus major shops and businesses in certain streets. While Hopkins and Buckley Streets and the southern end of Nicholson Street declined, the northern section of Nicholson, as well as Paisley and Barkly Streets prospered, people frequenting stores like Hooper's, Wittner's (shoes), Paterson's (furniture), Griffiths' (the jeweller's), Shaw & Co (the grocer's), Scovell & Spurting (menswear), and Maples. Branches of Coles and Woolworths were yet to open in Footscray. There were odorous hair-dressing saloons and boxing gyms and many half-filled pubs. There were several picture palaces and several palais de danse, in addition to dance halls and halls for every kind of social activity.

A History of Footscray says: 'These were the years of fullish pockets, bulging string bags and prams packed so high that baby could barely be seen. Friday night shopping was the rage, and 'See ya down the street!' signified the social importance of shopping. Sliding rollers and banging doors indicated precisely at 12 o'clock on Saturdays that trading hours were over. Saturday arvo and Sunday were for window-shopping, amid swirling fish and chip wrappers, and eddying grit. Only the pubs, greengrocers, fishmongers, picture theatres and milk bars were open on Saturday afternoons... On Saturday the picture theatres inhaled thousands of kids at one o'clock and exhaled them again between three and four... Adults could go the pictures or a dance any night of the week, excepting only Sunday. Home from work by train, tram or push-bike, young people wolfed down their tea, had a good wash, donned their glad rags and headed, rain or shine, and usually on shank's pony, for the bright lights. For between seven and eight o'clock the verandah lights came on at the Barkly, Troc, and Grand... Each of the dance halls had academies attached to them, for the new dances came thick and fast.' There they learned the tango, turkey-trot, fox-trot, and Charleston, and gyrated to jazz.

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In Footscray, the pushes which assaulted each other, as well as citizens, schoolboys and scouts, were the Troc Eagles, the Royals and the Moore Street mob. Animosity between football supporters, abetted by pushes, resulted in punch-ups, stabbings, kickings and the throwing of bottles and stones before, during and after football games. Footscray Football Club, which had won five Association premierships since 1898, became all but invincible after the First World War, winning four premierships between 1919 and 1924 and twice being runners-up. After beating the VFL (Victorian Football League) champions, Essendon, in a charity match in 1924, Footscray, along with North Melbourne and Hawthorn, was admitted to the League the following year.

In the meantime, the aged Richard Honeycombe had reached a kind of apotheosis of his own.

He was pictured in a full-page photo montage in the Melbourne Sun, recording the Eight Hour Day (now Labour Day) procession on Monday, 23 April, 1923. The Sun said: Top: general view of the procession going up Bourke Street. Top (insert): Mr David Wood aged 78, an old secretary of the Masons' Society, joined in 1863. Circle: Mr J Wardley (left), aged 107, a Past President of the Bakers' Society, and Mr R Honeycombe, aged 94, who first marched with the Masons' Society in 1856. Both rode in a carriage in the procession.'

He would not in fact be 94 for another five months. But in the photo he looks very well for his age, if a little bent. He wears a smart silk top hat, and a coat, and his beard and moustache are now white.

How he must have relished the occasion, the applause and cheers of the citizens of Melbourne as he rode by, and the honour and attention dignitaries accorded him. His outfit was old-fashioned, but he, and Jane (now 74), must have wanted him to look his best. Did Fanny, Louie, Jessie, Addie and Dick come into Melbourne to see the passing parade of trade union floats and banners, brass bands, carts and carriages, and call out and wave as the old man passed them by? Did his daughters, Mary Ann Regelsen, Hettie Steel, and Louisa Allen? Did Jack? And did George's children, or those of his other dead son, Tom? Or did they just catch a glimpse of the old man in some paper, or read his name, and say: 'Look at this! I thought the old devil was dead'?

He achieved another kind of immortality that year when young Dick's first child was born, on 26 September 1923. A boy, and the old man's third great-grandson, he was christened Richard Arthur.

He was the fourth generation of Honeycombes in that family to have Richard as his first name, and all four were born in September. The baby boy was actually born on his great-grandfather's 94th baptismal day and on the 76th anniversary of the wedding at Gretna Green. But he was never known as

Richard - or as Dick, or Dickie. His mother, Addie, insisted that her first-born, and only son, be known as Arthur.

A month later, the old man's youngest brother, John the gold-miner, died in Kalgoorlie at the age of 81. This meant that Richard was now the last living offspring of William and Elizabeth Honeycombe, who had emigrated to Australia in 1850. He had also outlived his wife and three of his sons.

The following year further glory was his when he was invited to unveil the Eight Hours Monument at a new island site at the top of Russell Street and opposite the impressive Trades Hall in Victoria Street, Melbourne. The monument had been previously erected in Spring Street in 1903. A tall dark pillar of granite mounted on two stepped blocks, it was topped by an oblong frame containing the numbers 888 and an orb girt with the words Labour, Rest, Recreation. The inscription on the base block was simple - 'To Commemorate the 8 Hours Movement initiated in Victoria in 1856, erected 1903'. Headquarters of unions like the Stonemasons and Builders, and the Carpenters and Joiners, stood nearby - as did the old Melbourne Jail, where Ned Kelly, amongst others, was hanged.

A photograph taken at the unveiling appeared in the Melbourne Argus on 14 February 1924. It showed four eight-hour pioneers: GA Stephens, son of James Stephens who was one of the movement's founders; D Wood, who at the age of 10 had marched with his brother in the first eight hours procession (in 1856); and R Honeycombe, said in the caption to be '95 years of age, the only surviving member of the 1856 committee, who unveiled the monument'.

Richard was driven thither in an open-topped car by a Dr Wright, along with GA Stephens, James Wardley and a certain Tom Burrows.

Again - did any of the Footscray Honeycombes, apart from his elderly daughter, Jane, witness this event? The old man was a local identity after all, the first Honeycombe in Australia to be mentioned in the papers and achieve a kind of fame.

Would that the radio station, 3AR, which began broadcasting in Melbourne that year, had thought to interview him about his life and times. Would that Jane had kept a diary, or the letters that he and she had received throughout their long sojourn in Albert Street.

But that era was coming to an end, as was Richard's life. As if in recognition of this, of handing over the cup of life to another generation, he gave his great-grandson, Arthur, a little silver tankard when Arthur was one year old. The tankard was inscribed 'Arthur, from his great-grand father R Honeycombe, 26 September 1924.'

As far as we know, the old man was unable to attend the Eight Hours' Parade in April 1925. He was also unable to reach the 80th anniversary of his wedding at Gretna Green and his own 100th birthday in 1929.

Richard Honeycombe died of senility and heart failure at his home in Albert Street, Footscray, on 7 July 1925. He was 95 and 10 months old.

He had travelled far from his birthplace in Devon in 1829. He had fathered nine children, four of whom were sons whose descendants would bear

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The inscription on the family gravestone in Melbourne Cemetery says, correctly, that he was 'in his 96th year'. Most of the newspapers that recorded his demise said he was 96. All referred to him as an 'Eight Hours Pioneer'. The Herald said: 'Although Mr Honeycombe did not walk in the original Eight Hours' Procession, he was one of the early supporters of the movement, and in late years he and Mr Wardley, the veteran president of the Bakers' Union, aged 108, were given the place of honour in the Eight Hours' Day celebrations.

The Argus said: 'The death of Mr R Honeycombe, an old and esteemed member of the Operative Masons' Society, yesterday, at the advanced age of 96 years, removed one of the last pioneers of the Eight Hours movement. In recent years, Mr Honeycombe and Mr Wardley, ex-president of the Operative Bakers' Society, who will be 108 years of age in October next, occupied the place of honour in the annual Eight Hours procession. Some years have elapsed since the last of the founders of the movement passed away, and though the names of Messrs Honeycombe and Wardley are not enrolled on the scroll of honour at the Trades Hall, they are regarded as the last of the pioneers who played a prominent part in the early struggles of the industrial movement.'