Kirkby Lonsdale to Australia
The following section is written by Barry Croft, from Melbourne, Australia. If you think you might be connected in some way to the family branch outlined here, please do get in touch via this website and I'll pass your details on to Barry.
This is the story of one branch of the Croft family from Kirkby Lonsdale, Westmorland, who migrated to Australia in the 1800s.
But first a brief history of the settlement of Australia by the British. In 1787 the First Fleet which consisted of 11 ships departed Portsmouth with over 1000 convicts, marines, seamen and government officials and supplies to establish a new colony at Botany Bay near present day Sydney. Further settlements were established in Tasmania and other locations in following years. The First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay 1788 and the colony initially struggled to survive, but by the 1820s the colonists were well established and looking for new opportunities. The explorers Hume and Hovell were commissioned to travel south of Sydney in 1824 in search of new grazing and agricultural land. They discovered the Murray River, Australia’s longest and arguably most important river and after an arduous and dangerous journey they stumbled onto the beach near current day Geelong on Port Phillip Bay. After they returned and reported that there was excellent grazing and agricultural land with several good rivers, settlers began to spread into current day Victoria.
But first a brief history of the settlement of Australia by the British. In 1787 the First Fleet which consisted of 11 ships departed Portsmouth with over 1000 convicts, marines, seamen and government officials and supplies to establish a new colony at Botany Bay near present day Sydney. Further settlements were established in Tasmania and other locations in following years. The First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay 1788 and the colony initially struggled to survive, but by the 1820s the colonists were well established and looking for new opportunities. The explorers Hume and Hovell were commissioned to travel south of Sydney in 1824 in search of new grazing and agricultural land. They discovered the Murray River, Australia’s longest and arguably most important river and after an arduous and dangerous journey they stumbled onto the beach near current day Geelong on Port Phillip Bay. After they returned and reported that there was excellent grazing and agricultural land with several good rivers, settlers began to spread into current day Victoria.
In 1835, a group of Tasmanian businessmen formed the Port Phillip Association and sent John Batman to explore the potential for a settlement on Port Phillip Bay at the site of current day Melbourne. John Batman bought land from the local indigenous Australians, the Wurundjeri tribe. This is the only settlement in Australia that recognised the indigenous people who had lived on the land for thousands of years before the coming of Europeans. The aboriginal people had no concept of owning or selling land and did not really understand the deal they had made.
Batman returned to Tasmania and he and 30 others returned to establish a settlement on the north bank of the Yarra River and a man named John Pascoe Fawkner led another group, which settled on the south bank a few weeks earlier. In a few short years, many free settlers and ex-convicts followed and by the late 1830s there was a need for more families, workers and single females to meet the growing demand in the new colony. A scheme was established to encourage people to emigrate from England, Scotland and Ireland to Australia to meet the need. Private agents were given permission to act on behalf of perspective employers to offer free travel and guaranteed jobs for any people who would be brave enough to travel to the new colony. This scheme was known as the bounty scheme and the agents advertised throughout England, Scotland and Ireland for perspective emigrants. Life was very tough at this time in Great Britain and the agents had no difficulty in enticing the poor and adventurous to sail to a new life on the other side of the world. The agents were commissioned to find people who were young and fit and had skills, particularly in construction and agriculture.
Enter one Ralph Harrison Croft who was born on12 April 1813 in Kirkby Lonsdale, Westmorland, England to James Croft and Elizabeth Rose or Rowe. Ralph came from a family with a long history of stonemasons. He applied to the emigration agents and was listed as 21 years of age (he was actually 28) and a carpenter. He was accepted and sailed for Australia on the ship, Intrinsic, from Liverpool on the 6 June 1841, just 6 years after Melbourne was first settled. After 4 months at sea the ship carrying 157 adults and 95 children arrived in Melbourne on the 7 October 1841.
A bounty of 19 pounds was paid to the agent for each adult on the Intrinsic, with each of the ship’s crew and the doctor receiving a cut of this amount for each bounty passenger. Conditions on the 4-month trip were relatively good and the emigrants were happy with their treatment during the voyage and were described as having excellent health on arrival. On the trip six babies passed away and one young mother died soon after giving birth. Only one baby who was born during the voyage survived.
Ralph must have done reasonably well in Melbourne and was described as a farmer at the inner-city suburb of Moonee Ponds in 1847.
Ralph married Betsy Ann Popple on the 24 January 1848 at St James Anglican, Melbourne’s oldest church. Betsy Ann was the daughter of Thomas Popple and and Mary Winter from Goadby in Leicestershire. Betsy Ann was 17 and Ralph was 35. Betsy Ann’s father, Thomas, who was only 2 years older than Ralph, owned several farms in the Northcote (Separation), South Morang and Whittlesea (Medland Estate) districts north of Melbourne. He purchased the 320 acres known as Hunter’s Road Dairy in South Morang, Victoria in 1852 for the considerable sum of £640. He renamed the farm Goadby Lodge after his wife’s home town in England. Ralph and Betsy Ann lived most of their lives around this district and possibly worked on the Popple dairy farm and the construction of the nearby reservoir at Yan Yean, which was built at the time to supply water for Melbourne. Ralph’s background in stonemasonry would have equipped him well for the construction of the reservoir and associated bridges and aqueduct at Yan Yean.
In 1835, a group of Tasmanian businessmen formed the Port Phillip Association and sent John Batman to explore the potential for a settlement on Port Phillip Bay at the site of current day Melbourne. John Batman bought land from the local indigenous Australians, the Wurundjeri tribe. This is the only settlement in Australia that recognised the indigenous people who had lived on the land for thousands of years before the coming of Europeans. The aboriginal people had no concept of owning or selling land and did not really understand the deal they had made.
Batman returned to Tasmania and he and 30 others returned to establish a settlement on the north bank of the Yarra River and a man named John Pascoe Fawkner led another group, which settled on the south bank a few weeks earlier. In a few short years, many free settlers and ex-convicts followed and by the late 1830s there was a need for more families, workers and single females to meet the growing demand in the new colony. A scheme was established to encourage people to emigrate from England, Scotland and Ireland to Australia to meet the need. Private agents were given permission to act on behalf of perspective employers to offer free travel and guaranteed jobs for any people who would be brave enough to travel to the new colony. This scheme was known as the bounty scheme and the agents advertised throughout England, Scotland and Ireland for perspective emigrants. Life was very tough at this time in Great Britain and the agents had no difficulty in enticing the poor and adventurous to sail to a new life on the other side of the world. The agents were commissioned to find people who were young and fit and had skills, particularly in construction and agriculture.
Enter one Ralph Harrison Croft who was born on12 April 1813 in Kirkby Lonsdale, Westmorland, England to James Croft and Elizabeth Rose or Rowe. Ralph came from a family with a long history of stonemasons. He applied to the emigration agents and was listed as 21 years of age (he was actually 28) and a carpenter. He was accepted and sailed for Australia on the ship, Intrinsic, from Liverpool on the 6 June 1841, just 6 years after Melbourne was first settled. After 4 months at sea the ship carrying 157 adults and 95 children arrived in Melbourne on the 7 October 1841.
A bounty of 19 pounds was paid to the agent for each adult on the Intrinsic, with each of the ship’s crew and the doctor receiving a cut of this amount for each bounty passenger. Conditions on the 4-month trip were relatively good and the emigrants were happy with their treatment during the voyage and were described as having excellent health on arrival. On the trip six babies passed away and one young mother died soon after giving birth. Only one baby who was born during the voyage survived.
Ralph must have done reasonably well in Melbourne and was described as a farmer at the inner-city suburb of Moonee Ponds in 1847.
Ralph married Betsy Ann Popple on the 24 January 1848 at St James Anglican, Melbourne’s oldest church. Betsy Ann was the daughter of Thomas Popple and and Mary Winter from Goadby in Leicestershire. Betsy Ann was 17 and Ralph was 35. Betsy Ann’s father, Thomas, who was only 2 years older than Ralph, owned several farms in the Northcote (Separation), South Morang and Whittlesea (Medland Estate) districts north of Melbourne. He purchased the 320 acres known as Hunter’s Road Dairy in South Morang, Victoria in 1852 for the considerable sum of £640. He renamed the farm Goadby Lodge after his wife’s home town in England. Ralph and Betsy Ann lived most of their lives around this district and possibly worked on the Popple dairy farm and the construction of the nearby reservoir at Yan Yean, which was built at the time to supply water for Melbourne. Ralph’s background in stonemasonry would have equipped him well for the construction of the reservoir and associated bridges and aqueduct at Yan Yean.
Ralph and Betsy Ann had a long and very productive marriage. They had 16 children between 1849 and 1877. Only 9 of their children survived to adulthood. Life was tough and diseases took a heavy toll. In 1860, there was an outbreak of influenza in Melbourne and four of Ralph and Betsy’s children died in 1860, including their oldest child, James, who was 11 years old. Three more children died in 1864, 1865 and 1868. To survive such tragedy and continue to raise a large family must have shown extraordinary fortitude. This extraordinary fortitude helped later generations to survive unimaginable conditions during World War II. Ralph was appointed to the Plenty (now called Mernda) school board in 1866, his family made up a significant proportion of the student population.
Ralph Croft died on the 26 January 1897 age 83 in Kensington Hill, Melbourne and Betsy Ann died in 1893 aged 56.
Ralph’s children and grandchildren spread throughout Victoria. The following picture shows some of his children and grandchildren pictured in 1929 at Lardner near Warragul, Victoria.
Ralph Croft died on the 26 January 1897 age 83 in Kensington Hill, Melbourne and Betsy Ann died in 1893 aged 56.
Ralph’s children and grandchildren spread throughout Victoria. The following picture shows some of his children and grandchildren pictured in 1929 at Lardner near Warragul, Victoria.
Second from the right in the back row is my great-grandfather Jim (James) Croft. His wife, Mary Ann, is in the front row on the right.
Ralph Harrison Croft’s nephew, Robert Croft migrated to Australia in 1856 on the ship, Red Jacket, at the age of 19. Robert was born in 1837 to Ralph’s unmarried sister Jane. Jane was no longer in the records by 1841 when the census recorded Robert living with another woman named Jane Squires and in 1851 he was in the Kendal workhouse. He arrived at a momentous time in the history of Australia at the height of the Victorian gold rush. We do not know exactly what he did when he arrived, but he shows up in the records in a very unusual way, to be explained later.
Ralph’s brother James (still in England) had four children, but his two sons died as young children. His two daughters, Martha and Elizabeth remained with their parents in Blackburn, Lancashire until after their father died in 1876. They then decided to follow their uncle to Australia and in 1880 arrived in Adelaide on the ship Cuzco. They moved to western Victoria and in 1889, 33-year-old Martha married Fredrick Malster in Hamilton. Now for a twist in the story when we catch up with Robert who at the age of 52 married his first cousin Elizabeth, who was 42, in 1889. Why the cousins were married, or if they knew how they were related, we do not know. They had no children. Robert died in 1899 and there is no mention of Elizabeth on his death certificate.
Martha had four daughters but only one of her daughters married and this daughter had no (legitimate) children. Martha’s oldest child, Lilian became a nurse and in WWI travelled to the island of Lemnos in Greece where she treated soldiers coming from Gallipoli which was only a short distance away. The horrific conditions she faced on this island have been memorialised in the ABC television series, “The ANZAC Girls”. Lilian kept a photo album of her time on Lemnos which is held in the Hamilton History Society Museum.
Martha’s children had no children of their own, and this line of the family came to an end in the 1970s. This may have been the end of their story except for an amazing coincidence and the power of the internet. After reading the Croft history on this web site, I contacted Stephen Croft to thank him for creating such an interesting site. He came back to me and said that another Australian had contacted him hoping to reunite a member of the Croft family with a family bible they had purchased at a second-hand shop on Kangaroo Island, an isolated island with a small population, near Adelaide. The bible belonged to the family of James Croft, Martha and Elizabeth’s family. How the bible arrived on Kangaroo Island we will probably never know. Stephen suggested that my family may be the closest surviving relatives of this line of the Croft family and that I may be interested in obtaining the bible. Well, I was very excited to have this unexpected link to our Croft relatives from England and, with the kind assistance of the ladies who purchased the bible on Kangaroo Island, the bible made the 3000 km journey back to the Croft family.
Now back to my direct family line through Ralph Harrison Croft’s son, James Harrison (Jim) Croft who was born in 1862 in Morang. James was the second of Ralph and Betsy Ann’s children to be named James, their first child, James, having died two years before. Jim married Mary Ann Lowes in 1888. Mary Ann was born in 1869 on the goldfields in Scarsdale near Ballarat during the gold rush years. They had their first child, Victor, in 1888 and went on to have 5 more children. Victor, my grandfather, married Martha Brown in 1910. He served in WWI on the island of New Guinea which at the time was partly ruled by Germany and was therefore a potential base for German attacks on Australia. Victor had four children before WWI and two after the war. They lived in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, and my father, Stanley James Croft, was born in 1920 in Prahran. During the later 1920s they lived in Carlton, close to the notorious, now very fashionable, Lygon St. The family was very poor, and Victor was not around, with Martha struggling to raise the family on her own during the great depression. One of my father’s favourite stories was that one of his brothers earned some money for the family making “deliveries” for a laundry in nearby Lygon St. The laundry was a front for an SP bookie run by Australia’s most famous gangster, Squizzy Taylor. I wonder what was in some of the deliveries?
My father Stan was 19 at the outbreak of WWII and he enlisted in the 4th Anti-tank Regiment in June 1941. He sailed to Singapore on the 30 July 1941. Six months later he was present at the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 and was taken prisoner by the Japanese along with 140,000 other allied soldiers. Churchill said that the Fall of Singapore was the worst disaster in British military history. The next three years can only be described as hell on earth as the prisoners were held at Changi prison and then sent to Burma and Thailand to build the infamous Burma railway and finally were shipped to Japan to work as slave labour on the docks and in the coal mines. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was not a term used in the 20th century, but my father suffered all his life from the experiences of those three terrible years. He rarely spoke of this time but during one bout of depression he told me that he could remember standing in line in Burma waiting for their meagre allowance of rice gruel when every second man in the line dropped from the effects of dysentery, malaria or exhaustion. In Japan, he initially worked on the docks in Nagasaki but was moved to a coal mine to the north of Nagasaki. One consolation was that his brother Victor was in the same prisoner of war camp in Japan. The conditions suffered by the prisoners have been described in movies such as “The Bridge On The River Kwai”, “Railwayman” and “Unbroken”. The fortitude shown by earlier generations of the Croft family surely helped him to survive treatment that many prisoners did not survive. At the end of the war he remembered passing Nagasaki which had been destroyed by the second atomic bomb.
On his return to Australia he went to recuperate with his grandfather and grandmother in Apollo Bay, a beautiful coastal town on the Great Ocean Rd in Victoria. There his fortunes changed as he met the love of his life, Jean Ada Hamilton, and they were married in 1946. In Apollo Bay, they lived in a tiny cottage with their four children who were born during their time there. Stan got a job with the government Lands Department, helping to manage environmental pests and state-owned lands. A further two children were born when they were transferred to Warragul in 1960. My father and my mother, Jean, shared many happy and some difficult times raising a large family. Jean, now 95, still lives in Warragul and has 24 grandchildren and 26 great-grandchildren.
Now back to my direct family line through Ralph Harrison Croft’s son, James Harrison (Jim) Croft who was born in 1862 in Morang. James was the second of Ralph and Betsy Ann’s children to be named James, their first child, James, having died two years before. Jim married Mary Ann Lowes in 1888. Mary Ann was born in 1869 on the goldfields in Scarsdale near Ballarat during the gold rush years. They had their first child, Victor, in 1888 and went on to have 5 more children. Victor, my grandfather, married Martha Brown in 1910. He served in WWI on the island of New Guinea which at the time was partly ruled by Germany and was therefore a potential base for German attacks on Australia. Victor had four children before WWI and two after the war. They lived in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, and my father, Stanley James Croft, was born in 1920 in Prahran. During the later 1920s they lived in Carlton, close to the notorious, now very fashionable, Lygon St. The family was very poor, and Victor was not around, with Martha struggling to raise the family on her own during the great depression. One of my father’s favourite stories was that one of his brothers earned some money for the family making “deliveries” for a laundry in nearby Lygon St. The laundry was a front for an SP bookie run by Australia’s most famous gangster, Squizzy Taylor. I wonder what was in some of the deliveries?
My father Stan was 19 at the outbreak of WWII and he enlisted in the 4th Anti-tank Regiment in June 1941. He sailed to Singapore on the 30 July 1941. Six months later he was present at the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 and was taken prisoner by the Japanese along with 140,000 other allied soldiers. Churchill said that the Fall of Singapore was the worst disaster in British military history. The next three years can only be described as hell on earth as the prisoners were held at Changi prison and then sent to Burma and Thailand to build the infamous Burma railway and finally were shipped to Japan to work as slave labour on the docks and in the coal mines. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was not a term used in the 20th century, but my father suffered all his life from the experiences of those three terrible years. He rarely spoke of this time but during one bout of depression he told me that he could remember standing in line in Burma waiting for their meagre allowance of rice gruel when every second man in the line dropped from the effects of dysentery, malaria or exhaustion. In Japan, he initially worked on the docks in Nagasaki but was moved to a coal mine to the north of Nagasaki. One consolation was that his brother Victor was in the same prisoner of war camp in Japan. The conditions suffered by the prisoners have been described in movies such as “The Bridge On The River Kwai”, “Railwayman” and “Unbroken”. The fortitude shown by earlier generations of the Croft family surely helped him to survive treatment that many prisoners did not survive. At the end of the war he remembered passing Nagasaki which had been destroyed by the second atomic bomb.
On his return to Australia he went to recuperate with his grandfather and grandmother in Apollo Bay, a beautiful coastal town on the Great Ocean Rd in Victoria. There his fortunes changed as he met the love of his life, Jean Ada Hamilton, and they were married in 1946. In Apollo Bay, they lived in a tiny cottage with their four children who were born during their time there. Stan got a job with the government Lands Department, helping to manage environmental pests and state-owned lands. A further two children were born when they were transferred to Warragul in 1960. My father and my mother, Jean, shared many happy and some difficult times raising a large family. Jean, now 95, still lives in Warragul and has 24 grandchildren and 26 great-grandchildren.
The Croft family will continue to contribute to the great country of Australia in future years.