My family has owned Lanark since 1937. Every story has its beginning, and I suppose Lanark’s story really begins with the first Fenton to arrive in Australia—my great-grandfather, David. Fenton is an old English name, but there are many Fentons in Scotland, too, and my own family is Scottish by origin. Our branch of the Fentons came from a village not far from Edinburgh, where a lot of the Fentons were concentrated. A short drive east of Edinburgh there is a fortified tower—a small castle, really—which dates to the 1500s and is called Fenton Tower. In recent years it has been turned into up-market accommodation for tourists. I have only seen photos, but what I find interesting is that there is not a tree in sight. It has occurred to me that if my own Fentons came from there originally they may well have arrived in Australia feeling instinctively uncomfortable with trees around them.
David Fenton came to Australia with his wife, Mary, in 1852. Gold had been discovered in Australia the year before, and we may assume it was gold that enticed David to Australia. By 1856, he and Mary had settled with their young family at Victoria’s premier gold town, Ballarat. For a while he scratched around for gold in the Ballarat district, apparently without much success, and later ended up at Ararat, a handsome town about 100 kilometres west of Ballarat. In 1862, just ten years after arriving in Australia, David died of tuberculosis in Melbourne. He had apparently been separated from Mary for some time and had drifted to Melbourne in search of work. From what has been passed down about him, it seems he was a heavy drinker and, accordingly, had neither money nor the ambition to earn it.
At the time of her husband’s death, Mary was 31 years old and still living in Ararat with her children, one of whom was my grandfather, John Fenton. A few years later she married an Ararat businessman named James Donisthorpe Smith, who, among various interests, had a grocery store and a wine-and-spirit business. By all accounts, he treated his stepson John quite well, and for a time paid for him to attend a private boarding school at Geelong. John left school at around the age of fifteen and began working as a delivery boy for his stepfather’s grocery business. He rode around Ararat on a bicycle with a basket at the front, delivering goods to the store’s customers. The story goes that one day, when John was about sixteen, he overheard a couple of people talking about a property that was about to go on sale in the town. He gleaned from the conversation that the property would be a very good buy and, apparently by alerting his stepfather to the opportunity, was able to make some money from the transaction.
For young John, it was to prove the first of many successful deals in real estate, a business that he later made his career. Before that, though, he took another step that was to shape the rest of his life: he married a girl named Helen Laidlaw, known to all as Nellie, who belonged to a family well established in the Amphitheatre district. (Amphitheatre, a name that may sound odd to motorists from other states who happen to drive through, is a small township on the Pyrenees Highway between Ararat and Maryborough. The township was originally located in a natural amphitheatre, from which it took its name, but was later moved to another site on the highway.) John and Nellie were married in 1884 and made their home in Hamilton.
John Fenton became a stock and station agent. He ended up with his own agency, to which he admitted several partners, including his son-in-law Bill Beggs, of whom more will be said later. But John Fenton retained control of the business until it was sold to Australian Estates in 1937, after which he retired at the age of 81. He died in 1940, aged 83.
Thanks to the success of his business, John Fenton became quite wealthy. He came to own, either individually or in partnership with others, numerous rural properties as far away as Forbes in New South Wales. For a couple of years, from 1904 to 1906, he was Hamilton’s mayor. He was an interesting character: reserved and subdued in manner, yet kind in his own quiet way. He was rather serious and inflexible, and it seems that people meeting him for the first time found him a little intimidating. He was also a teetotaller. The tragedy of his life was the loss of one of his two sons, Jack, in World War I, just five months before the war ended. Born in 1892, Jack was older than his brother Dave, my father, by a couple of years. He was also a little taller than Dave and better looking. He was better at sport than my father, too. All in all, he was the apple of everyone’s eye—and he was certainly the apple of his father’s eye.
Jack was 26 when he was killed in France. When news came of Jack’s death, my grandfather was inconsolable. Among our family relics is a photo of a family gathering in Hamilton to farewell Jack before he went off to war. It was obviously a dinner, for the people in the photo are dressed up to the nines, and with one exception everyone looks sad and despondent about Jack’s impending departure. The exception is Jack himself, who was obviously pleased to be going. Jack was one of 79 men from Hamilton killed in World War I, a dreadful toll which affected the town in many ways. For instance, my mother’s oldest sister, Berta, who was born in 1902, did not marry, and nor did many other Hamilton girls of her generation. The reason so many women of the same generation never married was, of course, that the men they might have married were dead, killed in the war. Aunt Berta had a large group of unmarried female friends of about her age in Hamilton, many of whom were still getting about in the 1980s. (Berta herself lived until 1998.)
I have been told that my grandfather’s attitude towards my father changed after Jack died, and he became sterner and more rigid than before. I am not sure of the reason, but I suspect he may have felt, subconsciously, a tinge of resentment at the fact that David was alive while Jack, almost certainly the favourite, was dead. It was not as if my father shirked military service, incidentally. He joined the Australian Flying Corps and was due to go overseas, but, fortunately for him, the war ended before he left.
After the war, probably in 1919 or 1920, my father joined his father in the stock and station business as a junior partner. Not long after this my grandfather posted a notice on an office wall that was clearly directed at my father. It advised everyone working there that the office car had to be garaged at 7 p.m. each evening and was to remain garaged until 7 a.m. the next morning. It seems my father had been using the car for fun after working hours, and my grandfather decided to put a stop to it. My father was never invited to take over the business, and he was still a junior partner when my grandfather eventually sold it.
My father may not have been as good a sportsman as his brother Jack, but he was still a fine tennis player and good enough at cricket to represent a Hamilton district side against the English team that toured Australia in the summer of 1920–21. The match was played at Melville Oval in Hamilton. David Fenton made 17 not out in the first innings, his team’s second-highest score, but in the second innings was bowled for a duck by the great England opening batsman Jack Hobbs.
As it happens, Hobbs’s opening partner for much of the 1920s, Herbert Sutcliffe, visited Hamilton too, although on a separate occasion. There are a number of photos of him at my grandparents’ home, where he stayed. According to family legend, Sutcliffe took a liking to my father’s sister Nell, so much so that they ‘stepped out’ together during his visit. I may add here that Nell Fenton never married. She spent her life caring for her father, John.
Although my father never became a full partner in the family firm, he did well enough to be able to buy Lanark when it came on the market. It seems he handled much of the sheep and cattle side of the business, while my grandfather concentrated more on valuing and selling properties. One of the properties my grandfather bought before World War I was a 9725-acre (3900-hectare) property near Cavendish, north of Hamilton, which he earmarked for Jack. The property never came to Jack, of course, and it did not come to my father, either. In his will, old John Fenton left it to his four daughters. This was, I suspect, another indication of how John’s attitude towards my father was soured by the loss of his other son.