My Great great grandparents were Alice nee Webb and Hugh Stirrup Crompton.
They met and married in Bolton in the UK and travelled to Australia late in the 19th C. It was a life of moving about and never quite settling down. Sometimes this was as a result of great tragedy, but other times the reasons have been lost.
The two met in Bolton. Alice was the youngest of her parent’s children, being born in 1859.
Hugh lived nearby. He was about two years younger than Alice, and the second youngest of six children to Elizabeth and John Crompton. He was possibly the Hugh S Crompton who worked as a messenger with the Bolton Post Office at age 16. However, by the census in 1881, he was working as a Bakers’ Van man. Carting items of one sort or another in and out of the city seems to have been his family’s trade. (One of his sisters had married a baker on Christmas Day in 1871, however he had died by the time High was working in the business).
When Alice and Hugh married, Hugh was living in Grecian Crescent, just a few hundred metres south of Alice. As his family had been in the area his whole life, then it’s likely he and Alice met at school or church – St Marks Church and School sat between their homes.
Alice and Hugh lived in a part of the city that by their lifetimes was solidly industrial: cotton mills and terrace housing. There wouldn’t have been much that was green. Or much that suggested that life might ever be lived another way. Both had limited education. Hugh had been working since he was at least 10 and Alice’s experience was probably similar. Hugh may have travelled further afield, assisting his parents with deliveries (the 1871 census has his mother at Umberton Farm, Hulton – about 2km south west, Umberton Farm is still in fairly rural area today – with his younger brother, where they were record as provisions Dealers – Hugh himself, at age 10, was living at home in Bolton as an errand boy.)
Alice and Hugh married in Bolton in 1883 (perhaps on 20 March, or perhaps in the Apr-May-Jun quarter).
Then in early 1885, Hugh must have left Alice alone as he boarded the ship Merkara in London in February and two months later disembarked in Queensland, Australia. On arrival he was noted as single. Possibly saying he was single might have helped secure a passage or to find work once he arrived. Once he was settled he may have then been able to sponsor his wife and son to join him.
Still at home in Bolton, Alice gave birth to a son in Jul-Aug-Sept quarter of 1885 – Fredrick Webb Crompton. Just after Fred’s first birthday, Alice and Fred landed in Sydney aboard the Aberdeen in 13 November 1886.
The ship Alice and Fred sailed on was almost exclusively women, and mainly single women, who were coming to the colony looking for work. On arrival, most went to the Hyde Park barracks which was in its last year of use as an immigrant depot. However, Alice and Hugh likely met up with Hugh.
Life in Sydney is mystery, but it ended suddenly and shockingly when baby Frederick died within the first 8 weeks.
In October 1887 Alice was home in Bolton when she gave birth to her first daughter, Lily.
Alice’s mother Sarah died in April 1890 and not long after Alice and three-year old Lily sailed for Australia again, aboard the Ormuz, this time disembarking in Adelaide.
I don’t think Hugh went back with her. Since their marriage, Alice and Hugh would have spent by far the majority of their time apart, and this attempt to migrate together, failed as well. Alice and Lily didn’t stay long, returning to the UK in either 1892 or 93 (not yet there for the 1891 census), where they seem to have stayed until 1895, when Lily was 7 and she and Alice sailed back to Adelaide.
By August 1896 the family were in Perth, Western Australia, where Hugh was working as a night soil collector for Subiaco council.
The following year, in September 1897, daughter Ida was born in Perth.
The four of them lived together in Railway Road, Subiaco. A double fronted Victorian house, with a palm tree in the front yard. They were far from rich, but a house like that with a front and back yard and the sunshine of Western Australia and compulsory education until the age of 14 and no cotton mills at all must have seemed like a very different world to Alice as she watched her girls grow up there. But, it was also a world without the tight interconnectedness of family that Alice would have been used to from Bolton. If things got tough in Perth there were no aunts and sisters to take on child minding, and no one earning a bit extra that could go towards someone else’s rent. Perhaps there was not even a sympathetic ear to hear out a trouble and make it seem less.
The Cromptons had the Rawson family as neighbours. Like the Cromptons, the Rawsons had come to Perth from elsewhere (Sydney), so the two young families may have become friends due shared circumstances.
One afternoon in May 1897 Agnes Rawson was bathing her toddlers while the baby, 16 month old Sydney Roy, was asleep on the nearby bed. While Agnes was out getting more water, the baby awoke and fell off the bed into the bath of water where he drowned. Agnes ran next door where Hugh was (presumably, as his work would have occurred in the very early morning, he was home during the day), but neither Hugh nor Agnes, nor the doctor who was soon summonsed, could revise Sydney who was pronounced dead.
By the turn of the century, things started to go wrong for the family. Hugh was fined twice for cruelty to his horses (he had four in total), in February 1902 his business relationship with John W Trumper was dissolved, and then in early 1903 he was injured and had to give up the night soil contract.
And Alice was unwell.
In June 1902 a ship left Fremantle bound for London, with “Crompton, child and infant” aboard.
The family story is that Alice died at sea. I certainly can’t find any record of her dying in the UK or Australia, yet in November 1903, when Ida was baptised in Bolton, it was recorded that her mother had died.
Lily and Ida lived with Hugh’s family in Bolton, presumably as it would have been almost impossible for him to work and raise children – even with teenaged Lily’s help. The family story is that Hugh went to South Africa this time, looking for work, however I can’t find any recorded evidence of this – however neither is there evidence of him being in Australia during these years…
Eventually, when Lily was 18, she and her nine year old sister sailed together for Australia, where they met up with their father. By 1912 the three of them were in Broken Hill – yet another contrast with both Bolton and seaside Perth.
Broken Hill seems to have been a period of relative stability for Hugh, spending at least ten years living in Crystal St South. He was still in Broken Hill (in Argent St) – with Lily – when he died in July 1925.
Stories about Hugh that have passed own through the family are of an intelligent, well-read man.
The First Ball I Took Your Mother To 