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HALL RECORDS/Bissett & HAH
File: HAH01.WPS
H.A.HALL and WINIFRED BISSETT
Winifred Bissett was a journalist in Perth who interviewed H.A.Hall, evidently with the intention of writing an article about him and his father William Shakespeare Hall. There is no date for the interview, but from the internal evidence of the notes it must have taken place in about 1958, when Mr Hall was living in a caravan at 35 Comer Street, Como.
Miss Bissett typed some notes from the interview, and gave a copy to Mr Hall, who added various notes and comments. These notes are now in the possession of H.A.Hall's daughter, Mrs H.M.Wilson, of Swanbourne. The typescript below reproduces Miss Bissett's notes and Mr Hall's additions. The notes themselves were typed onto small sheets of paper. The first three sheets are not numbered, while the remaining sheets are numbered 3 through to 54, which Miss Bissett probably did as an aid to compiling the final version of her article. In the typescript below, I have put Hall's comments in square brackets, to distinguish them from Miss Bissett's original notes.
Ian Berryman
10 June 1995
William Shakespeare Hall married late in life to Hannah Lazenby, daughter of a Town Clerk of Perth. They had two sons, Ernest and Aubrey, and one daughter Joy. Joy's daughter Louise is married to Commander Gilmour, R.N. and is living in England. Her mother is living with her.
Aubrey Hall married Helen Lodge, the daughter of Thomas Soutter Lodge, and the granddaughter of George Walpole Leake. They have three daughters, Mrs Alan Berryman of Como, Mrs Margaret Wilson of Claremont, and Miss Joan Hall, who is at present in England, where she is secretary to the famous novelist Paul Gallico. Ernest did not marry.
History repeated itself in the Hall family when Mr Aubrey Hall took over the management in of Andover Station, the station which his father founded 9 miles from Roebourne just six weeks after the Northwest was first opened up.
2. William Shakespeare Hall,* whose great aunt was Susanna Shakespeare of Stratford-on- Avon, and daughter of the poet, first came to Australia in the ship Protector, leaving London at the end of 1829, the first year of settlement of the Swan Colony.
[* who was so named because an ancestor married Susanna Shakespeare & thereafter quartered the Poet's arms on the Hall Escutcheon]
3. He was aged 4, and the second son of Henry Edward Hall,* who personally chartered the ship with another family.
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[Try Miss Lukis &/or Historical Society. I think all early Ships Passenger Lists are recorded]
[*H.E.H. was a Leicestershire fox hunting Squire of Shakerstone Manor near Market Bosworth & Melton Mowbray, who had studied Medicine, Botany, Geology & Metallurgy at either Oxford or Cambridge as an undergraduate. He did not stay to take any degrees, as he was called away from his University to inherit Shakerstone & the advowson of Shakerstone Parish Church, also a house in London where later W.S.H. was born]
6. Eight members of the Hall family arrived in the Protector in February 1830. They included Henry and his wife, the eldest son Henry Hastings Hall, the eldest daughter Sarah, Letitia, William Shakespeare, Theodosia Sophia and James Anderton. One more child, Frank, was born in Australia.
7. Ina statement witnessed by the Colonial Secretary Peter Broun, Henry Edward Hall also named as persons "brought at my expense unto this settlement" James Briggs Crane, carpenter and wheelwright; Tom Wallis, blacksmith; two female servants one 23 years of age, one 18; and six apprentice boys, one 16, one 15, three 14, and one 12.
8. Included among an interesting list marked "provisions, not luxuries" were - gin, rum, Cape brandy, Cape wine, port wine, sherry, madeira, constantia and hermitage.
9. "Miscellaneous effects" included one sloop, and one jolly boat. [also sheep, Hounds & poultry]
10. In the sloop and towing the jolly boat Mr Hall cruised along the coast south of Fremantle to explore the seaboard.
11. He must have been one of the first settlers to find his land in this way; and thus he settled at Mandurah, 69 miles south from Perth [about 50M, I think]
12. The very first settler was the wealthy Thomas Peel, a cousin of Sir Robert Peel, British Prime Minister and founder of the Police Force.
13. The British Government granted Thomas Peel a quarter of a million acres of land stretching from Cockburn Sound and south to the Murray River. In return Peel undertook to settle four hundred indentured migrants on it.
14. The whole scheme of settlement failed and the Peel family left the district, but not before Thomas Peel's daughter Dora had met Henry Hall's eldest son Henry. They were later married and had one son Leslie.
[who married his cousin Georgia Egerton-Warburton, eldest daughter of Geo E-W & his wife Amy Hester (of Blackwood Park) niece of H.Edward Hall & granddaughter of Capt Hester who fought under Wellington, was present at the occupation of Paris & took up his land grant on the Canning
[? & magistrate] for that District.
En passant. Beware before you go any further with your W.S.H. project. His parents were cousins
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(his mother Sarah Theodosia Branson). W.S.H.'s nephew Leslie Hall married as already mentioned W.S.H.'s great niece Georgia E-W & the latter's brother Philip E-W married a cousin of mine on my mother's side, a Miss Rowe sister of Mrs Jack Durack & Mrs Irene Harwood. These latter & myself have the same maternal grandfather Geo Lazenby who was Perth's first Town Clerk, had some architectural experience & supervised the building of the Town Hall, for details see Historical publications, his wife was a descendant of Boyd Earl of Kilmarnock who was taken prisoner at Culloden in 1746 & hung drawn & quartered for his loyalty to the Stewarts]
15. Soon the Halls were to leave the district and migrated to Perth when their sloop was wrecked outside the Mandurah Estuary
[I think on "Hall's Bank", hence the name "Hall's Head" & Hall St Mandurah also presumably are named for H.E.H. ]
16. Henry Edward Hall had received his education at either Cambridge or Oxford University with the view to qualifying for medicine. He progressed to the stage of walking Guy's Hospital, but abandoned his career on the death of a childless uncle from whom he inherited the entailed estate of Shakerstone Manor
17. When his two eldest children, Sarah and Henry, were old enough he sent them home to England with their mother to be educated. She placed them in English boarding schools and returned to Australia.
18. William, meanwhile, was growing up. He received his education under the Revd John Wittenoom, the first Colonial Chaplain. [who to eke out his slender salary conducted a Grammar School in Perth for many years. I have one of my Father's Latin Primers embellished with a libellous sketch of my Father done by John Leake who died on the Californian Gold Diggings. J.L. was my wife's great uncle]
19. During this time his father, needing further capital, made the long trip to England to join William's elder brother Henry, broke the entail of Shakerstone Manor, sold it and returned to Western Australia where he bought Wongong Farm (near Armadale miles from Perth)
20. It was here that William learnt his farming.
21. With the first gold rush fever in 1851 he was off to Victoria to dig, and then, following reports of a find in the Swan district, returned to the West to try his luck there. He had no luck.
22. This was the beginning of his life in the Northwest.
23. The furthest settlement north in those days was at Champion Bay, some ... miles north of Perth. Alone he travelled there from Perth, by now in the grip of that spirit of adventure which was never to leave him until he died, at the age of 70, whilst bathing in Cossack Creek.
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24. It was not long after he arrived at Champion Bay that he heard of the mooted survey trip of the North West to be taken by the surveyor Francis Gregory.
25. He made application to Perth to take part in the expedition, and was accepted.
26. In 1860 it was announced that F.T.Gregory and W.Burges had been in communication with Sir R.Murchison to equip a strong party to go north and the Geographical Society and the Imperial Government would contribute funds towards the expedition.
27. In January 1861, Gregory wrote a letter to the Legislative Council in Perth mentioning that W. and J.Burges, T.Brown and Walter Padbury were willing to supply horses and men to the value of £400 to land in Nickol Bay and explore the inland country.
28. Mr Gregory himself offered, if necessary, to put up £250 of his own salary as a surveyor in the Survey Department towards funds.
29. By a strange coincidence it was on Shakespeare's birthdate, April 23rd, in 1861, that the party sailed from Champion Bay for Nickol Bay. The party consisted of commander Francis Gregory, J.Turner, Edward Brockman, Shakespeare Hall, J McCourt, A.James, J.Harding, Maitland Brown, P.Walcott and Captain Dixon, the captain of the Dolphin with first mate Mr Manning.
30. Shakespeare Hall went ashore on the very first expedition from Nickol Bay to explore the inland. He accompanied Gregory and Captain Dixon and they rowed ashore in the lifeboat.
31. They observed open, undulating, loamy plain, with grass, a few small wattles, the wildflower hakea and white gum trees. They discovered and named the Nickol River.
32. In their return to the ship four days later they found that two natives had visited the Dolphin.
33. As the lifeboat pulled towards the boat the natives paddled away. They were on logs of wood, shaped like canoes, not hollow, but very buoyant. In length they were about seven feet, and one foot thick, and they propelled their canoes with their hands only, and their legs resting on a little rail made of sticks driven in on each side.
34. With some persuasion the natives came aboard Dolphin when the members of the expedition boarded her. Their dialect proved incomprehensible but Mr Gregory observed in his Journal that "they knew the use of biscuit and tobacco".
35. The expeditions ashore continued, going further and further inland.
36. Several rivers were named; the Maitland River, a fine pool of water eighty yards wide
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with beautiful grassy banks, and hundreds of cockatoos. Edward Brockman took aim with his gun and killed 16 with one shot.
37. The party came upon the Hamersley Range where a river opened out into deep reaches of water and contained an abundance of fish resembling cobblers weighing four and five pounds each. The river was named the Fortescue after the Under Secretary for the Colonies.
38. On June 21st, 1861, the Hardey River was named; on June 23rd the party came upon "a fine river containing permanent reaches of fresh water, lined with caves, the channel generally being from one hundred to two hundred yards wide and a depth of forty feet". It was named the Ashburton River after the president of the Royal Geographical Society.
39. On July 12th the party encamped on a shallow pool of brackish water. There, absorbed in capturing partridges, was a group of natives.
40. Gregory's journal describes their mode of doing this: "they used nets constructed out of the trodia bush, neatly twisted and netted in the same way as done by ourselves, with the mesh varying from one to five inches according to the purpose for which applied".
41. The birds were induced to enter the nets. First, ragged bushes were placed all around the small pools with the exception of a few spaces five to six feet wide. In these openings double rows of twigs were arched so as to meet overhead in the centre one or two feet from the ground. These little avenues led away from the pool for several yards then terminated with the net thrown over a few light sticks at the end.
42. The birds first alighted on the margin of the pool. After drinking they ran up the only opening which led under the arch of twigs and finally into the net which was drawn by the hunter.
43. Whilst the white men were making history treading on the virgin ground of the Northwest other members of the party remained on the Dolphin, filling in their time with fishing, making friends with the natives who paddled up to have a look at the strange boat, and making excursions to the reefs themselves to find pearl shells.
44. The tale is taken up here by Shakespeare Hall's eldest surviving son, Mr Aubrey Hall of Como, who is believed to be the only living Western Australian whose parents came out to Australia in the first year of its settlement.
45. He recalled that the name of the reef, where the expedition collected the shell in Nickol Bay, was named the Mooloojacka. "The white men would collect the shell", he said, "open it up and if there was no pearl in it would throw the mother-of-pearl shell away".
46. "My father thought about this for some time, and watched the shell glinting through the water until it finally sunk to the bottom. 'You should keep that shell’, he said. "You could be
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throwing half crowns away'."
47. "It was only a guess on his part but the crew did keep the shell, and the heads and sides of their bunks, and the bulkheads, were lined with pearlshell from that time on. When the vessel reached Fremantle a local merchant bought the shell at a good price and shipped it to London".
48. "After this every ship that went to the Northwest returned with its load of pearlshell." In those first days of Northwest settlement there were no wool cheques. Capital was going out for supplies, for food, for building materials, and none was coming in.
49. Money from the sale of pearls and pearlshell kept those early graziers going until their wool and sheep began to pay. Most of the earliest graziers used their natives for dry-shelling on the beach and reefs, and later for shallow diving. For deep-diving, Malays and Japanese were the only race physically capable of doing it.
50. On the recommendations of Francis Gregory after his surveying trip Walter Padbury, the man acknowledged to be the pioneer grazier of the Northwest, took up his first land on the de Grey River, and his station was given the name of De Grey Station.
51. He was followed by Shakespeare Hall, who had seen the country on his expedition trip with Gregory and found it good. Mr Hall landed sheep on the north beach at Cossack six weeks later. John Wellard of Serpentine, it was, who prevailed upon him to go north and open up a station for him.
52. Mr Hall had travelled his stock up alone from Perth to the district now known as Andover and became the first settler there. He remained for two years until he had tamed the natives, amongst whom was the much-feared King Mulangon.
53. Shakespeare Hall preceded John Withnell and his wife, "The Mother of the Northwest" by two years and it was at Andover that John Withnell left his little party when he first landed to look for a property.
54. Later Mr Hall became manager of the Roebuck Bay Company, was a Councillor at Cossack and was twice chairman of the Roebourne Town Council. He spent more than 40 years of his life in the Northwest.
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