Dan Herbert’s cottage, perhaps

The cottage at 2 Badajos Street, Ross said to have been built by Dan Herbert.

I had been asked to visit the aging woman who lived in a tiny cottage at the river end of Badajos Street in Ross. It was in the 1990s and she had been aloof from the community. I had not researched the Ross Bridge then and did not know of the connection between her house and Dan Herbert’s purported address.

She was expecting me and the door was ajar. The architraves were those of a nineteenth century house, built when the inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land were short. (Dan Herbert was five feet six and a quarter inches tall and Mary, his wife, was four feet eleven and a half inches). Reflexly ducking, I entered a wee passage between two rooms with doors open. Curtains were drawn across their street facing windows, like shrouds. The hall was only one room long and in five steps I was in the skillion. A ray of dusty sunlight fell on the kitchen table that was an island in a moat of uncluttered space. The ceiling sloped downwards over the sink and bench along the back wall. The woman was sitting at the table in the only chair that was not covered in stuff. She was round-shouldered and looked at me sideways as if she could not raise her head, fiddling with some tablets in a confusion that may have been chronic or momentary. The only way to help in the long run was to organise caring people to come in daily but she was not to be coerced. She was wary of me because she thought I was an agent of the community services come to turf her into a nursing home. But no, I was a visitor just come to make sure she was alright because the chemist had asked me to.

Through the back window I could see a backyard edged on the river side by a shed. In my memory, I see it half closed in by weatherboards admitting a four-paned window and a door, and half open at the near end for the storage of firewood – or for the carving of gravestones.

Now, about twenty years later, that cottage looms in my memory because some say it was Dan Herbert’s house. The land on which it crouches was granted to John Taylor and Dan Herbert was his tenant. In the maps of the day, a house is represented by a small square drawn at the top end of the lot, on the corner of Church and Badajos Streets. According to the 1842 census, it was brick. On the corner opposite is a lot that was purchased by Dan in 1846 in the name of his son, Frederick Stuart, born 1842. At one stage it was the pound, probably conveniently converted when Dan was pound keeper from 1858.

In March 1867, only eleven months before Dan died, the Herbert’s private affairs were exposed in the newspapers, owing to Mary’s prodigality. They were summoned before the Insolvent Court by the executors of the estate of Joseph Brickhill and other shopkeepers of Campbell Town whose bills had not been paid.

In 1866 - 67, Dan and Frederick had started to build a stone house on Fred’s land, though Dan was suffering from silicosis and Fred was an invalid, spitting blood, so Mary said under cross-examination.

Constable Shea stated in court:

I know where Herbert lives in Ross; the son usually lived with him until about the time of the insolvency; the property in Ross where insolvent is now living, is marked on the town chart as F. S. Herbert’s … the son has been working at the house lately making it fit to live in. I consider the house and ground to be worth £100 even in these bad times. It is a stone house.

Dan had been working as a labourer in Latrobe, according to the report of the first of four sittings of the court. During the year before, he had been employed by Robert Quayle Kermode at Mona Vale, collected on a Sunday or Monday and driven home on a Friday in their carriage. It seems that to pay the debt incurred by Mary’s spending, Dan sold Fred’s land and new house which was opposite the house they had always lived in but had recently left, owing to Mr Cleve’s demand for payment of rent. (Mr Cleve must have bought the land from John Taylor when the latter departed for South Australia). Probably, Kermode bought it from the Herberts and gave it to the Church of England; he largely funded the construction of the new church that was begun in 1868.

At the time of the court case, Mary, Dan and Fred were living in that stone house. It is said by their descendants, that Mary lived behind the Tucker’s public house after Dan’s death. I cannot say whether they both went there at the onset of their destitution, taken in by their daughter’s in-laws.

What remains is to interpret the tantalising sentence in the Cornwall Chronicle, Saturday, April 13th, 1867, page 3; a statement made by Constable Shea during the proceedings, referring to a time he had visited when Fred’s wife, Brenda, had absconded with their son and some property in September, 1865.

I recollect your son and his wife living in a cottage on the premises you lately occupied.

I think, the low-lintelled cottage that I had visited was that one, still standing on the far end of the block, possibly built by Dan in conjunction with his workshop. Perhaps it was a quiet place to be after arguments about the money. He would have built a workshop because he was a monumental mason. It would have been a little distant from his own house because the incessant tap tap of chiselling is an irritation to anyone living nearby. And he would have needed a place to store the stone he would have shown to prospective clients.

Perhaps that is where he went after the sale of the house and seizure of the unpaid goods;

perhaps he went alone, alienated from his family and exasperated beyond reconciliation.

He had said publicly, in court, that many of the goods included in the bills had been contracted by his wife and, he had every reason to believe, by his son and daughter and daughter-in-law, And he believed some of them, at least, to be wanton extravagance.

So the legend that the cottage at the end of Badajos Street was Dan Herbert’s might well be true. It is a sad story of an intelligent, talented stone carver who had brought to Van Diemen’s Land a defiance against the entrenched British political system and had organised its expression in architectural decoration like no other in the world. But who died in undeserved poverty, sucked dry by those who might have loved him most.