SEVERAL MILES SOUTHWEST of Kilkenny on the road to Callan, Clonmel and Fermoy there is a small road sign. It reads ‘Famine Graveyard 1km’. Down the road which turns into a slushy cart track one comes upon a silent field with a stone wall. Nothing distinguishes it from any of the surrounding fields except a sign on the gate which tells of ‘the uncounted victims of famine and poverty’ who are buried there, all from the Callan Workhouse. Most died during the Great Famine of 1845–49. The field is a vast paupers’ graveyard.
The story of the famine has been told elsewhere.1 Ireland, which has always been notable for its fecundity, was carrying a population of eight million when, in the first weeks of September 1845, the leaves on the potato crop blackened and turned into an evil-smelling pulp. During the next five years lack of food gave way to listlessness, starvation, pestilence and death. By the beginning of the new decade, when the great migration to the new world was well under way, Ireland’s population had already dropped to 6.6 million. A new slimmed-down Ireland would emerge, but not before nearly three million of its people had crossed treacherous seas to participate in social experiments in other parts of the world.
Two such families caught up in the famine and its consequent exodus were the Wards and the Dorneys of Cork. Little is known about the origin of William Thomas Ward, the father of Joseph Ward, except that he was born on 31 December 1829. Even his place of birth is in doubt; some reports speak of Dublin, others of Cork. The name Ward, meaning a bard, is common enough in England, but less common in southern Ireland. Nor is it clear where William Thomas Ward first met the woman whom he was to marry, Hannah Dorney. Her origin is more definite. There were Dorneys in Cork throughout the eighteenth century,2 and on 9 February 1823 a Thomas Dorney married Elizabeth Lynch in St Finbarr South Catholic Church, Dunbar St, a small, simple Georgian-style chapel, in the crowded central part of Cork. Their third child, Joanna, who later came to be known as Hannah, was Joseph Ward’s mother. She was probably born on 14 July 1829 and was baptised at the same church six days later.3 Another six children were born over the next few years, although they were not baptised at St Finbarr South, suggesting that the family had moved. Extensive searches of church records in adjoining parishes have not located where, precisely, Thomas Dorney and his family were living in the 1830s and early 1840s. The 1846 Directory for Cork City, however, says that a Thomas Dorney, a boot and shoemaker and leather cutter, lived at 35 North Main Street, Cork. Ward family inquiries in the 1960s, both of the Chief Herald in Dublin and of Australian cousins, led to the conclusion that this was Hannah’s father.
A graphic description of this section of Cork in the middle of the nineteenth century is to be found in Anthony Trollope’s Castle Richmond. ‘Main Street has but little honour. It is crowded with second-rate tobacconists and third-rate grocers; the houses are dirty, the street is narrow; fashionable ladies never visit it for their shopping, nor would any respectable commercial gent stop at an inn within its purlieu.’4 The Dorneys, according to family legend, were among the better-off residents of the street—Hannah’s niece was later to describe them as ‘fairly comfortable’. The children all received some education, and music was a constant part of their lives. Hannah’s oldest brother, Thomas, was said to be an accomplished musician. Hannah was taught to sing as well as play the piano.5 At a time when only 60 per cent of Cork city children became literate, Hannah learned to read and write, although from her only surviving letter it is clear that both her writing and spelling were more shaky than her devout yet simple Catholic faith.
The precise whereabouts of Joseph Ward’s parents throughout the Great Famine is in doubt. Hannah would have been sixteen when the potato crop, the staple food of Ireland’s teaming masses, failed. It is possible that for a time she, and some of her brothers and sisters, went to stay with relatives in the Cork countryside. Certainly Hannah learned early that in times of disease there were advantages in spreading the family about to ensure that not all succumbed. Family stories say that she was back in Cork by 1850, where on 7 October she married William Thomas Ward, a man who possessed some literacy as well as experience in bookkeeping and retailing. No evidence has been found of where the marriage took place. In the years before the famine it was common for women to marry at sixteen or seventeen. Postponement of marriage was a post-famine phenomenon. By 1850, Hannah was twenty-one and seems to have decided to understate her age for the rest of her life, possibly in an attempt to minimise the perception that she was on the shelf. The married couple must have settled around Main Street, for their firstborn, Mary Elizabeth Frances Ward, was born in the area on her mother’s twenty-second birthday, and baptised at St Finbarr South Church on 17 July 1851.6 Another child, William Thomas Vincent Paul Ward, was born on 27 September 1852. There is no record available of his baptism.
By this time the subject of emigration was being much discussed in Cork. The front page of the Cork Examiner daily carried news of pending sailings from Cork, the point of embarkation being just up the road from where Hannah and W. T. Ward were living. Ships sailed directly from Cork to New York, and there were some that went to Australia. It was more common, however, for those emigrating to southern latitudes to make the uncomfortable 23-to-36-hour crossing to Liverpool in open paddle steamers, there to embark for Melbourne, Cape Town or New Zealand on more substantial vessels. The lure of Australia that induced 101,000 Irish immigrants to go there during the 1850s was gold.7 Patrick O’Farrell describes them as ‘a much more accomplished, venturesome and happy lot than those the Famine had dumped on America’. It was a longer trip to Australia, more hazardous and expensive, and required a ‘very deliberate and considered decision’.8 Besides the lure of gold, the passage, while longer, was generally felt to be safer. The ships to Australia were better than the ‘coffin’ ships on the American run. They were less crowded, and their conditions more firmly regulated.9 Ward and his wife seem to have been considering Australia by the end of 1852, and several of Hannah’s brothers and sisters were also interested.
Leaving Hannah pregnant again, Ward went across to London in March or April 1853 where he, and possibly two of his brothers, boarded the Lady Flora bound for Melbourne. The ship of 756 tons, captained by John Parker, left London on 19 April with 236 passengers, all unassisted. Henry, William and Samuel Ward appear as one group on the passenger list. They were listed as English, but such mistakes in passenger lists were common.10 The ship arrived in Melbourne on 18 August 1853. Hannah had decided to travel on a bigger ship and to arrive some time after her husband in the hope that accommodation in Melbourne had already been arranged. In July 1853 with her two babies, she made the crossing to Liverpool with the intention of boarding a ship to Melbourne. No record exists of the conditions Hannah actually experienced, but Terry Coleman has described such crossings, noting that the steamboats from Cork to Liverpool at this time sometimes carried as many as 1200 passengers at ten shillings a time, crammed together on the deck with no shelter except an inadequate tarpaulin. Sightseers in Liverpool would come to watch the arrival of the ‘Irish steamers’ and the soaking wet emigrants who would stumble ashore, sometimes covered in one another’s vomit. Liverpool, with its population of 370,000, at this time was England’s second largest city and by far the most important emigrant port. Intending passengers to Australia or the United States would crowd into the squalid waterfront boarding houses awaiting their passage to the new world.11
On 22 July 1853 Hannah and her children boarded the Goldfinder, a substantial ship of 1380 tons under the command of the experienced Captain Hugh Stewart. The ship left with 534 passengers; only six died on route to Melbourne, where 454 adults, 60 children and 14 infants under the age of twelve months arrived on 24 October 1853.12 All passengers were unassisted migrants. Again the information on the ship registers was inaccurate. Hannah was listed among 305 English passengers rather than the 41 Irish who, along with 88 Scots, were the passengers whose origin was noted. All except seven, and Hannah’s family were not among the elite, travelled steerage.
Melbourne in October 1853 was crowded with immigrant ships, sometimes as many as 300 being in port at the same time. In the ten years 1851–61 the city’s population multiplied more than five times from 23,000 to 127,000.13 Immigrants resorted to desperate measures to acquire a roof over their heads. J. M. Freeland describes the scene on the south side of the Yarra River: ‘Tens of thousands of people hudded uncomfortably in a sea of tents called Canvas Town. Many solutions were tried and most of them abandoned in an attempt to meet the ever-rising call for houses … Ingenuity brought forth canvas, hessian, mud, grass and, the oldest of emergency answers, prefabrication.’14 The absence of a water supply or sewerage system meant that epidemics and a high rate of infant mortality were a constant feature of Canvas Town. It was here that the Wards almost certainly first found accommodation. Over the next few years they moved about, first to Hawke Street in North Melbourne, then back to Emerald Hill, where they lived for a time in a zinc house of ‘inferior’ standard in Bank Street,15 and then to Abbotsford Street in North Melbourne.
During the 1850s Melbourne was in the grip of gold fever, where ‘toughness, determination and luck’ in almost equal rations was necessary to survive.16 While immigrants dreamed of success on the fields at Ballarat and Bendigo, ‘gold was more easily won behind the counter than in the clay’.17 At first William Ward found work as an accountant for a retailing firm that was selling basic supplies to needy immigrants. By 1856 he was describing himself as a clerk, and the following year he appears as a ‘gentleman’, suggesting that he had been caught up in the unemployment of that year. It seems certain that he had taken to the bottle. Hannah, meantime, was trying to rear her family while increasingly being required to earn money as well. Melbourne turned out to be a nightmare for her. The baby, Charles Dorney Ward, that Hannah carried all the way from Ireland died in December 1853 after living for only five minutes. In November 1854 Michael Jerome Ward was born, and seventeen months later Joseph Ward was born in Hawke Street, North Melbourne, on 26 April 1856. The birth certificate makes no mention of the other name, George, that he carried throughout life, perhaps due to an oversight by his father, who registered the birth many months later. Ward was not present at Joseph’s birth.18 Joseph turned out to be the only one of eight children born in Melbourne to survive, and was his mother’s favourite throughout the rest of her life. In July 1857 another boy, Alfred John Ward, was born, the family now consisting of four boys and Mary, or Mina as she was now known, who was a robust child of six. The year 1858 was a tragic one for Hannah. Her husband was still out of work and drinking heavily. At the end of April Alfred died, aged ten months, of dysentry. On 13 June Hannah bore twin boys, Peter Joseph and Paul William, who promptly died. And then came a terrible blow; the four-year-old Michael died on 1 November. In January 1860 Hannah produced yet another boy, Henry Paul. By this time they were living in Abbotsford Street, where Hannah was running a small hotel close to the main road out to the goldfields. William Ward’s health was declining, however, and on 4 November he died, aged only thirty-one. The death certificate says he died of ‘softening of the brain’ and ‘Delerium Tremens’.19 The claim that he had been thrown from a horse appears to have been Hannah’s story, perhaps covering over the multiple misfortunes of her marriage.
Hannah’s Melbourne tragedies were far from over. A posthumous child, James, was born in March 1861 but lived only until June. A month before, Henry Paul had succumbed to diphtheria. By the middle of 1861 the widowed Hannah had only three of the ten children she had produced during her ten years of marriage still alive. Mina and Joseph both recovered from diphtheria, and Willie, who was now nine, had escaped infection by being sent to live with one of W. T. Ward’s brothers.20
By this time Hannah seems to have been looking after her children on her own with occasional help from her brother-in-law. Her younger brother, George Michael Dorney, had been with her for a time in Melbourne but in April 1860 he signed up with the British 40th Regiment to fight in the New Zealand wars. Two of her sisters would eventually find their way to Australia, but not until November 1863.21 Hannah was ambitious for her children and the three survivors were all at school. Joseph had been enrolled at a small private school, Spring’s Academy, in Spring Street. Home was Hannah’s small pub in Abbotsford Street where there was usually a meal, a drink and a bed available to diggers on their way to, or from, the goldfields. With a regularly changing clientele, the children learned social skills and would have heard many stories about success and failure in Bendigo and Ballarat as they participated in the singing of Irish ballads. Hannah was a stern disciplinarian and thrashed both Willie and Joey when she discovered they had been smoking.22 She was an attentive mother, however, especially to her children’s religious education. The parish priest was as often in their house as they were at the local church of St Francis.
On 31 December 1862, on what would have been W. T. Ward’s birthday, Hannah remarried. It is not clear where she met John Barron. He came from farming stock in Northumberland. On the marriage certificate Barron claimed to be thirty-seven, a bachelor, and a butcher by trade. However, the Index to Unassisted Passengers for the year 1858 indicates that Barron, a wife called Jane, a sister Christina, and two children—a daughter, Christina, aged eleven and a son, John, aged seven—had arrived in Melbourne in October 1858. Barron’s wife, son and daughter seem all to have died in 1859.23 Why he then proposed to Hannah as a bachelor rather than a widower will always be a mystery. This might not have been the only falsehood he told. In any event, the marriage to Hannah lasted only a few months. It seems that he deserted her. She then decided to leave Melbourne for good. On 17 September 1863, a Mrs Barron said to be thirty years old, with a daughter Minnie, listed as five, Joseph as seven and William as three, sailed to Bluff, New Zealand, on the 239-ton ship Edina, arriving on 23 September. There is no record of any John Barron having come to New Zealand in or around that time.24 Nor is there any further mention of Barron. In legal documents signed in 1879, Hannah described herself as ‘living separately from her husband’ and in possession of a protection order under the Married Women’s Property Protection Act 1860, an Act that guaranteed a wife ownership of property acquired after her husband’s desertion, so long as such desertion was ‘without cause’. Not until the 1880s did Hannah begin describing herself as a widow. Her religion would have prevented remarriage while Barron was alive, and she did not remarry after his death. She called herself Hannah Ward Barron during the rest of her life, and was quite particular about the ‘Ward’ in her name.
Throughout Joseph Ward’s life the details made public about his time in Melbourne and his arrival in New Zealand were frequently inaccurate. Ward seems to have believed all his life that he had been born in Emerald Hill, on the south side of Melbourne, when his birth certificate shows him to have been born in North Melbourne. There is no evidence that he ever, at any stage, took steps to correct the other misinformation about his arrival in New Zealand.25 Ward was always more interested in the present than the past, and his children had only the vaguest information about their father’s origins. Almost certainly this was due to Hannah who was anxious to put the horrors of Melbourne behind her. One of her grandchildren, Mina Lenihan, many years later told of the difficulty she encountered when trying to find out more about those Melbourne years. ‘One day when I was young, I asked mother where he [Barron] was, who he was, and what happened to him. She did not know, and volunteered the information that she did not know anybody who would have the temerity to mention his name to Grandma.’26 In all probability, Hannah, whose affection for her children was very strong, nevertheless always placed stories about the Melbourne years off limits, and Joseph’s own memory of them was hazy at best.
In Melbourne Hannah had probably heard the stories of gold in Otago. Certainly many ships were leaving Australia each week for the south of the South Island. The Central Otago strike was past its peak by the end of 1863, but there were stories of small discoveries in Southland, especially around Tiwai Point.27 Probably Hannah decided to gamble on this information. She soon established a small store at Greenhills, just north of Bluff, where she ran a similar establishment to Abbotsford Street, with the addition of a few basic items needed by the miners. The goldrush quickly died away. Hannah moved her family the mile or two south to the port of Bluff. She lived there for the rest of her life.
With its population today of 2500 Bluff still seems remote; its 800-foot-high hill covered in bracken, forbidding. In 1863, according to Joseph Ward, ‘the population did not number more than 50, excluding the native population, which was then a large one’.28 A small public school had just been established which bore the official name of the township until 1917, Campbelltown. The port had been designated an official port of entry to New Zealand in 1856 and smaller vessels from Melbourne occasionally docked there. The novelist Anthony Trollope, who was familiar with Ireland, arrived in Bluff in 1872. His description of it may give a clue as to why Hannah settled there. ‘The place at which we landed had a quay, and a railway, a post office, and two inns; but it had nothing else. The scenery was wild and pretty—more like the western sea coast of County Cork than any other that I have seen. The land was poor, and for some distance around apparently useless. There were hills on all sides, and mountains in the distance. It would be impossible to imagine any country more unlike Australia….’29 To Hannah Bluff may have seemed all at once part of the new world, not Australia which had been so traumatic, but a place with a strongly nostalgic appeal.
Bluff had other advantages as well. The flat peat swamps of Southland were beginning to respond to drainage, scrub-felling and the work of the all-purpose Clydesdale horse. Once the swamp between Bluff and Invercargill, eighteen miles to the north, had been crossed with a railway track in 1867, wool and wheat could make their way in larger quantities to Bluff for export. Fishing as well as oyster-gathering from a depth of 16 to 20 fathoms in Foveaux Strait began to sustain a small industry around the port in the 1860s.30 Bluff seemed to have a trading future, plenty of visitors, and a school for Hannah’s children. Soon she was running a small boarding house on the waterfront which catered for visiting seamen who sometimes found themselves waiting for as long as one month while their ships loaded and unloaded.
Like other seaports around the New Zealand coast, Bluff was the only part of the region with a slightly cosmopolitan atmosphere. The young Wards encountered smatterings of French and German at the breakfast table.31 Some of the foreigners stayed in Bluff. There were soon names like Metzger, Roderique, Deschler, Longuet and de Smidt living in the small settlement. These influences helped the Wards, whose Irish Catholic background made them different, meld into the new society. All children had to attend the same school, and the Wards seem not to have encountered any sectarian feeling. They drew their friends from among Scots Presbyterians, Methodists and Anglicans, even if their own religious observances set them somewhat apart as they waited for the itinerant priest on horseback from Invercargill. According to family legend, Hannah occasionally walked or rode as far as Invercargill to mass.32
Joseph Ward did well at school. A contemporary described him as ‘always a very lively boy, full of pranks and fun, and absolutely devoid of vice’. Years later one of his old friends recalled the time the children painted a horse to look like a zebra. Joseph was ‘exceptionally smart in class and was an all-round athlete’.33 Ward quickly emerged as the natural leader amongst his peer group. His closest friends were Walter Henderson, who had been on the Edina with them from Melbourne, George Waddel and members of the Nichol family whose father ran the seafront store. At Ward’s bidding the kids regularly earned pennies at the port by cutting toetoe feathers at Greenhills and selling them to ships’ passengers.34 The port’s isolation bred a certain do-it-yourself attitude among the settlers. There was no local authority there until 1878 and if the residents wanted cricket or boating facilities they organised them themselves. By the end of the 1860s a cricket club, a gymnasium and a boating club had been formed. With a concerted effort the locals raised enough money to buy two out-of-date, unrigged, six-oar gigs from the Invercargill Rowing Club. Joey, as he was known around the settlement, was in one of the first crews to use them. The boys cleared a patch of manuka fronting on to Gore Street and made a cricket pitch of sorts,35 and as late as 1890, three years after Joseph Ward had entered Parliament, he was still president of the Campbelltown Cricket Club. It was not long before Ward organised the Bluff Naval Volunteers, a group that he liked marching before ‘in martial style’.36 A community spirit was developing in the port, and the Southland Regatta Committee became its regional manifestation. The New Year regattas at Bluff, organised initially on quite a small scale by Joey and his friends, grew into annual festivals that drew as many as 10,000 people to the port.
Young Joey’s commercial skills were not acquired from his peer group. They came from Hannah. Many years later a friend described Ward’s ‘devotion’ to her as ‘a very beautiful picture. No business, commercial or political [activity] was allowed to interfere with any engagement his mother wished him to keep with her.’ From the only letter still existing between the pair the very strong bond is clear. She gave him advice, encouraged him, and taught him to seek guidance from Jesus, Mary and Joseph whenever he felt angry about anything. Whenever he was away from home he would write regularly. Hannah has been described by her grandson, Vincent, as a woman of ‘unquenchable optimism, keen insight and shrewd business instinct’.37 By the end of the 1860s her boarding house was making money and she had plans to develop it. She would make it into the best hotel in town. But she needed capital to purchase the freehold, and borrowing was always difficult for a woman alone. In 1869 Joey left school so that he could help the family’s capital accumulation. He joined his brother Willie in the employ of the local postmaster, Charles Tipping. Ward earned ten shillings a week delivering telegrams and he learned to tap out morse code, a skill which he would sometimes display to dignitaries in later years when as Postmaster General he was opening a new post office. By early May 1870 the Wards had gathered together the necessary £150 to purchase the freehold of the boarding house. The section had a road frontage of 33 feet, and was deep enough to carry extensions to the building. This was the start of Hannah’s accumulation of titles that enabled the imposing Club Hotel to be erected next to the post office. By the time of her death it was the biggest hotel in Bluff, and still has the best facade on to the main street.
Joey’s career at the local post office lasted a little more than two years. In 1872 he gave cheek to Tipping and was instantly fired.38 It was an incident that both parties regretted, Ward because at sixteen he was now unemployed, and Tipping because he was soon courting Mina Ward. Joey was growing into a fast-talking, yet personable young man. He soon had employment with Sam Nichol, the owner of the general store a few doors down Gore Street. Joey worked there for four years as a clerk and general hand.39 He gained some skills at bookkeeping, just as at the post office he had seen the inner workings of a government department.40 By 1876, when Ward left Nichol’s to become chief clerk with the Railways Department, the Wards were as well known as any family in Bluff. Hannah’s hotel kept her in touch with the citizenry, and Joey, who was a solid, handsome young man with an olive complexion, standing nearly five feet eight inches in height was probably the best known of the younger generation in town. He was soon wearing a beard which he later trimmed back to a very full moustache. Later still, he waxed it. It became his trademark, often to be accentuated in cartoons. Even in the mid seventies the young Joseph Ward had become ‘a clever, brisk, active man, with a wide range of interests’. James Cowan said of him: ‘It was probably his Irish ancestry that gave him his sunny nature, his traits of generosity and quick sympathy.’41 He dressed well, and the adjective ‘dapper’ that was so often used of him in later life was already appropriate. A bowler hat and a cane soon became his affectations. He was very much the young man about town. He enjoyed the outdoors and was a good horseman. While he read anything from newspapers to Shakespeare if he could lay his hands on it, Ward’s forte was conversation. Many an hour was spent in discussion with friends, and especially with his mother, who was always a source of stories, songs and advice.
The Club Hotel, Gore Street, Bluff, 1890s.
The earliest photograph of Ward, about 1872–3.
Ward’s new job with the Railways Department extended his contacts beyond Bluff. Freight to and from the port was expanding daily. The railway line north turned Bluff from an isolated port into an entrepot. Goods needed to be stored for onward consignment, and Ward learned about bills of lading, railway and shipping timetables and general farming practices as his contacts with the hinterland expanded. In January 1877 the Bluff Harbour Board was formed and substantial wharf redevelopment was soon under way. Ships and trains meant goods and people, and to traders like Hannah and Joey these were potential wealth. Joey decided that year to go into business on his own account. Hannah lent him £800, and at the same time bought a section of land for Mina Tipping and her young family in Foyle Street.42 Ward had already obtained a land grant section in Bann Street in 1874. He now rented a shed next to the railway line in Gore Street, where he stored wheat, skins and wool that he had bought from farmers to the north. From the sheds he would arrange for the export of the produce through the port. He seems to have aimed this commercial venture directly at smaller producers. They were always short of capital and liked to sell their produce quickly rather than await the overseas commercial transactions that might take months if large stock and station agents were involved. There were risks for Ward, however. After paying cash for the goods he took the risk that in the end he could on-sell at a profit. In the mood of optimism prevailing in Bluff in the late seventies it seemed a gamble worth taking.
Ward realised early that he needed to control the environment in which he was becoming a commercial player. The viability of his enterprise depended on shipping and ensuring that Bluff remained the principal port for the region. When the Invercargill/Dunedin rail line was opened in 1878 this could no longer be guaranteed. Port Chalmers took more and bigger ships; Bluff was still host only to coastal vessels and smaller trans-Tasman steamers. Ward took a number of steps to protect and enhance his position. He opened an office in Dee Street, Invercargill, near to the railway station, and then moved in 1882 to the New Zealand Shipping Company building in Esk Street. It was not long before Joseph Ward Esq. was catching the early train each morning, pacing impatiently up and down the carriages as they rumbled the eighteen miles to Invercargill.43 With his own, as well as Bluff’s interests in mind, he had also decided to enter local government.
