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In which we introduce Mr James Squire
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There is something worth knowing right here at the start before you go any further – James Squire was a real person.
It was at a family gathering not long after I started working on this book that I realised the fact Squire once lived and breathed wasn’t common knowledge. At the get-together I mentioned to my brother-in-law that I was writing a biography of James Squire. He looked at me confused. Which is exactly the sort of thing you’d do if someone had just told you they were writing a biography about a person who wasn’t real.
My brother-in-law thought James Squire was a creation of some marketing guy – because of the modern-day line of beers that bear his name and tell a not-always-accurate version of his life story. He thought that they created a man who never was. So it occurred to me that maybe my brother-in-law wasn’t alone – maybe there are loads of people out there who think this James Squire character has just been made up to flog beer.
Well, I can assure my brother-in-law – and anyone else who carries that misconception – James Squire is very, very real. Well, he was very real; nowadays he’s very, very dead. If you’ve ever walked along Circular Quay in Sydney on the way to catching a ferry or hauled your body up and down the undulating maze of streets that is The Rocks, you’ve likely stood where James Squire stood (yeah, there was no concrete, paved roads or footpaths in his day, but you know what I mean).
James, an English publican busted for stealing chickens, came out on the First Fleet and, near as I can tell, would have had his tent – and later a proper home – set up in the vicinity of The Rocks. That is where the male convicts were located, with the women on the eastern side and the soldiers in the middle in a forlorn attempt to keep the two apart. Though the soldiers themselves weren’t above a nocturnal wander through the female convicts’ encampment. A wander, it should be said, that was often quite welcomed by the female convicts.
If you’ve ever had cause to head up the Parramatta River and gotten off at the Kissing Point terminal, you’re also in James Squire territory. After he’d served his convict sentence and became a free man, Squire set up a brewery, pub and a farm in what is now known as the Sydney suburb of Ryde.
There is a paper trail that shows Squire was a living, breathing figure during most of the first 30-odd years of the settlement of Sydney Cove. His name appears in the court records in the early years of the settlement at Sydney Cove – twice as a defendant and at least once as a witness. He is mentioned in the diary of Ralph Clark (a soldier, misogynist and failed purchaser of Aboriginal children) makes regular appearances in the Sydney Gazette, the newspaper of the colony and just a few years before his death he gives evidence to a government inquiry into the colony – which is where we get almost all our knowledge of his brewing practices.
While the story wrapped around the beers that bear his name does include some embellishment, there is also some truth there. He really did get flogged for theft in Sydney Cove (though almost certainly got more than 150 lashes), he didn’t seem to have great trouble finding a lady (it’s worth remembering that, in the early days of the settlement, men greatly outnumbered women) and he was at one stage paid to enforce the law as a police constable.
But, as you’re about to find out, some of the Squire story you’ve learned from beer labels isn’t true. Why they had to make up anything strikes me as odd because Squire’s life wasn’t short of interesting events.