(Transcribed by Ross Williams, a great grandson of Emily Bennett)
In the early hours of day as I lay only partially awakened from sleep, I fancied I was lying on a beautiful beach of glistening sand listening to the gentle murmur of the ocean waves as they rolled over and over. On the crest of each there seemed to be the faces of friends and the people I had met in the past years, from my early childhood, all of them with the light of life in them quite recognisable. Many of them have left their names as honoured remembrances to their descendants and some still numbered with the living and holding high office here and elsewhere.
As the faces kept appearing before me, happy hours were brought to my memory so vividly that I decided to put to paper occurrences of my life and the people I had met as a girl and woman.
My father was a schoolmaster in Westminster, England and a member of the Craven Church1 of that district, among other young men he also taught in the Sunday School, among these the Brothers Mudie of Library London2. One admired my mother, whose youngest sister had married Mulready the painter. In the fifties3 my father brought my mother and myself as a baby young (??) to Australia with letter of recommendations to John Fairfax, Mr Mansfield4 and others holding good positions in Sydney, who received him cordially and helped him to form a school held in the rooms at the back of the Baptist Church to which they belonged.
As there were very few schools in those days, he received a great number of scholars and imparted a Commercial Education. Many men that have held good positions attended. My mother was young and pretty and became a great favourite. My father was clever and scientific and gave lectures both in the school and at other institutions, such as the School of Arts, Pitt Street; which I remember stood back off the street with a small enclosure and an iron railing, next door on one side was the residence of George Wilkie, whose large bakery reached through to George Street. On the other side the well-known family of the Wyatt’s lived over the Ironmongery establishment.
Among the earliest remembrances called up by the “Faces in the Waves” were those who used to meet in one house which was a large picture-house in Oxford St. just a few doors from what is now Oxford Circus. All the houses on the left hand side between Riley and Palmer St. to my recollection being private, while from Riley Street to the Park5, called then the Race Course, being one long paddock or field belonging to the Burdekin Family. While opposite where Mark Foys6 and Rainfords Hotel stand was picturesque grounds on which stood a very immaculate home owned by the Wyatt Family. I remember as a child many a grand Military funeral passing along Oxford Street to the strains of the Dead March in Saul. My first recollection7 of it being Sir Thomas Mitchell’s, who lived then.
(??) Indicates doubts about the accuracy of the transcription. There may be others.
Notes
- Here, Emily is actually referring to the Craven Chapel, a Congregational Chapel in Westminster, opened in 1823 and funded by Lord Craven. Emily’s paternal grandfather, James Cane, had also been a member of this church. (For more on the Craven Chapel see: https://aim25.com/cgi-bin/vcdf/detail?coll_id=12557&inst_id=118 )
- This reference is to Mudie’s Lending Library. In the mid-19th Century, Charles Edward Mudie revolutionised library lending in England with a one Guinea annual charge, entitling the subscriber to borrow one exchangeable book at a time. From the Library based in in Oxford St, London, books were also delivered across the UK and internationally. Mudie was also the author of a number of well-known hymns one of which, I lift my heart to Thee, was a Congregational Church favourite of the day, published in Horder’s Congregational Hymns, 1884.
- They actually arrive in December 1848.
- Interestingly, given Emily’s later marriage into a newspaper family, both were ‘newspaper men’, Ralph Mansfield, a Methodist missionary had edited the Sydney Gazette and from 1841 the Sydney Herald.
- Hyde Park
- Before the opening of the present Plaza Building in Elizabeth Street, Mark Foys was located on Oxford Street, on the corner of Oxford and Brisbane Streets, and Mark Foys and Rainford’s Cambridge Club Hotel occupied almost the whole of the Eastern corner diagonally opposite Hyde Park, between what is now Wentworth Avenue and Brisbane Street. Wentworth Avenue did not exist until 1910, following the slum clearances in Surry Hills
- Emily would have been 8 years old when Sir Thomas Mitchell died in October 1855. It is not surprising that this very large military funeral, reported at the time to be one of the ‘most numerously attended ever witnessed in the colony’, made a lasting impression on her. She lived with her family close by in 2 adjoining terraces, 44-46 Stanley Street, one their house and the other the school rooms. They are now occupied by Bill & Toni’s Italian restaurant.