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In which James Squire decides what do with all his stuff
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It’s early in 1822. Squire is 67 years old, which is not a bad innings for the era. It’s certainly longer than he could have expected to live had he stayed in England.
But he’s not feeling the best. As the weeks go on he starts to feel more poorly, and spends more and more time in bed. His partner Lucy looks after him as best she can, while also having to oversee the running of Squire’s businesses.
Squire, a man who spent most of his life in this new colony keeping busy, can’t abide having to stay in bed. It feels lazy, and on top of that it’s always been hard for him to lie comfortably due to the scars on his back from those 300 lashes almost 30 years ago.
The scars are always covered by a shirt when he’s in public, and that allows others to forget where he came from. It lets them overlook that this prosperous king of Kissing Point was once a lowly convict who was spat out of England and travelled to this strange place in the bowels of a ship, surrounded by others just like him.
Others may forget his convict past, but Squire doesn’t, especially when he feels those scars catch against the linen of his shirt, or scrape the bedsheets at night. Lucy and the others before her would run their hand over his back, as if to show that the marks did not bother them. But they did bother him.
He knows that being a convict and being sent here was a blessing in disguise. It did cost him all hope of ever seeing his dear wife Martha and their children John, James and Sarah again. Even though he was halfway around the world, destined never to see Martha again, he still couldn’t bring himself to marry another. But the seven-year sentence to Sydney Cove also gave him boundless chances that would have never been open to the likes of him in England.
It’s hard for him to imagine anyone in England carrying scars of a convict across their back ever being allowed to climb even a rung or two up the social ladder as he has here. In Sydney, he’s managed to climb enough of those rungs that others now look up to him, and even the colonial leaders have been known to utter his name – and in admiration, not disgust.
But he also knows those scars to be a curse, a permanent reminder he carries of just where he came from and what he’s done. Those scars are something best worn by a convict and not a pillar of the community. Perhaps the community has forgotten about them, but he hasn’t. Those days in late 1789 when he was twice tied to that pole and whipped – 150 lashes each time – are always with him. Just like those scars.
By March, the illness has not abated. If anything, Squire feels worse, more lethargic. Getting out of bed is far too much of a chore. The doctor comes round and suggests he has cancer. Squire knows enough about medicine to know that’s not a good sign. Yet, still he hopes he might see signs of improvement. I’ve come this far already, he thinks, surely a few more years isn’t too much to expect.
A month later and he realises that, perhaps a few more years is unlikely. The way he feels, a few more months might also be unlikely. If he were to die this year, he does notice it would bring a strange symmetry – it would split his life almost in half. There would be the 34 years he spent in England, and then there was almost the same amount of time in Sydney. How appropriate, he thinks to himself, that the journey in a convict ship in 1787-88 should come to so neatly split his life half.
He knows it’s time to get his affairs in order. He feels proud of what he’s achieved here and how many possessions he has to pass on to various loved ones and those who aided him.
So around April 6, he begins to write (or dictates to someone else) a six-page document that starts with the words; “This is the last will and testament of one James Squire of Kissing Point ...”
There is a chance that Squire’s last months passed something like that. But perhaps they didn’t – we’ll never really know for sure. But he most certainly left a will, one in which he seemed to have managed to bequeath something to each member of his larger-than-normal family.
He could have ended up with fewer assets to divvy up. In May 1817, he placed an ad in the Sydney Gazette, putting all the land he owned up for sale, as well as 100 Merino ewes, six heifers and a bull. Why he chose to sell up isn’t known for sure, but there is the suggestion that he was looking to shack up with Lucy Harding at her place and therefore no longer had a need for all this land. Or maybe he felt he was just too old and wanted to pack it all in.
While it may not be clear why he wanted to sell, what is clear is that he wanted to sell all of it. And to the one buyer; there is no indication that he would entertain the possibility of selling it off in bits and pieces – it was all or nothing. It seems a big ask to find one person who has both an interest in all of Squire’s land and who is cashed-up enough to be able to afford it all. So maybe Squire’s heart wasn’t completely in the sale.
He did try and sweeten the pot a little bit – any buyer would also take home “300 weight of hops” from the latest harvest.
Five years later, all this land and sundry animals appear in his will, so either Squire could not find that one magic buyer or he had a change of heart and decided to keep it all.
And so he writes his own will. Or he dictates it to someone else. It’s hard to conclusively state one way or the other, which is a real shame because if we knew for sure it was in his own hand it would be the longest document Squire wrote that we still have and it would speak volumes about his level of education.
The problem is that, aside from that day in June 1793 where he witnessed a convict wedding and signed his name on the marriage certificate, there are no other documents definitely written in his own hand.
In favour of Squire writing his own will is that it is in the first person. Also, the way his own name is signed at the end of the will is largely identical to the way he writes his son James Squire’s name in the body of the will – only the J is different, which suggests they were written by the same person.
In favour of it being in some unknown person’s hand is the fact that what is meant to be Squire’s signature at the bottom of the will doesn’t really resemble his signature from that marriage certificate. There is a “JS in brackets immediately after Squire senior’s name so perhaps the man himself just initialised what someone else wrote. That would also explain why the names of James Squire senior and junior look very similar – they were both written by the same unknown person.
Also against it being in his own hand is the section at the end of the will that names the witnesses. That is written in the same hand as the body of the will and is in the first person – from the perspective of the witnesses (“... for his last will and testament in the presence of us...”). This would seem to count against the theory that because the body of the will is written from Squire’s perspective, therefore it must be in his hand.
One other thing; if Squire was ill at the time of the will being written (cancer is the illness that most have claimed he had) then the writing seems quite neat and ordered to have come from the pen of someone who was about to shuffle off this mortal coil. The words are neat and evenly spaced and sentences go straight across the page, which is no mean feat on unlined paper. That the ill Squire could write like that for the six pages of his will does seem unlikely.
So as much as I’d have liked it to be otherwise I have to conclude that he didn’t write the will himself.
That said, there are still a number of valuable things to be drawn out of James Squire’s will. Firstly, despite not having seen his wife Martha and their children for more than 30 years, Squire didn’t forget them. He left Martha £50, the equivalent of more than £10,000 today. His English children John, James and Sarah each got £30.
The Sydney-born James (whose mother was Elizabeth Mason) was named an executor for the will – alongside Squire’s partner Lucy Harding. In the will he scored the brewery and house at Kissing Point as well as the 25 acres they stood on. But that wasn’t all – he also got another three land lots, bringing his tally to 221 acres.
James’ sister Elizabeth landed 170 acres as well as Squire’s house in Castlereagh Street while Mary Mason appears to have been the favoured child, being left four land lots totalling a whopping 950 acres.
All of which makes you feel sorry for their sister, Priscilla. She was the one whose father was listed as Phillip Morris on her birth certificate. In the will, Squire admitted paternity, calling her “a natural daughter of mine by the said Elizabeth Mason” – the same words used to describe all the other children they had together. However, her share of her father’s assets paled into insignificance when compared to her siblings; she was left with just 30 acres of land to hold until her son James Devlin turned 21 and then he got it. So she really got nothing to call her own.
It really causes one to wonder at the relationship between Squire and Priscilla. Did she do anything during her life to cause her father to divide the riches in such a way that she effectively missed out altogether? Or perhaps the paltry amount she was left was because he was not really her father. Had Elizabeth fallen pregnant to the mysterious Phillip Morris early in her relationship with Squire? Did Squire reluctantly choose to raise the baby Priscilla as one of his own, leaving her less in his will than her siblings because she wasn’t a “real” daughter of his?
The grossly uneven split of the loot among Elizabeth Mason’s kids certainly raises a few questions and serves to increase the mystery of just who Priscilla’s father was.
Squire’s first Australian son Francis (whose mother, Mary, had died) got £30, as did John Bray, the son of Squire’s deceased daughter Martha Mason.
Sarah Mason was left £100 and her son George Lucas (not that one, another one) got £30.
Someone by the name of Mary Audling got £100 and “a suit of mourning” for services to his family while five other servants got just £10 to buy their own mourning suit.
Squire certainly didn’t forget his current partner Lucy. In terms of liquid assets, she was the big winner, being left £900. She also got a boat that bore her name, the bed and bedstead they slept in “and any other articles of household furniture she may choose amounting in value with those already mentioned to the sum of £100”.
Whatever was left over was to be divided up between the Mason kids – which the will stated included Priscilla. As is so often the case with a parent’s will, the kids would soon start squabbling over it. The legal fight was apparently sparked by some dubious antics from executor James Squire Jr, which we will read about soon.