When Sir Charles Hotham and Lady Jane Sarah Hotham arrived in Victoria on 21 June 1854, the people of Victoria had high hopes of their new governor. Ellen Young was among them. For much I hope a change is near / New brooms they say sweep clean, she wrote a few weeks before the regal couple docked. We soon shall have Sir Hotham here / He’ll make a change I ween.
Hotham’s predecessor, Charles La Trobe, had been a shocker. Inexperienced as an administrator, he was ill-equipped to oversee the massive population explosion that followed the discovery of gold. As Victoria’s first Lieutenant Governor, La Trobe had managed a fledgling colony of 3000 people. On his watch, public debt had skyrocketed and confidence in the government had plummeted.
But on Hotham’s arrival there were flags strung up, brass bands playing and wild cheers for the official welcome parade through the streets of Melbourne. Artillery fire sounded from Flagstaff Hill, and Hotham made an impromptu speech to the rejoicing crowd, promising to do his duty as an honest, straightforward man should do. Such frank, liberal speeches, Charles Evans noted, won Hotham the goodwill of the people.
The people of Melbourne are looking for the arrival of Sir Charles Hotham as religious enthusiasts might look forward to the millennium, the editor of the Geelong Advertiser had written on 8 June. But George Francis Train, for one, was cautious. I hope [Hotham] is equal to the times in which he lives, wrote Train on 23 July, for if he is not, depend upon it his official reign will be painfully brief, for our people have begun to think.
The Geelong Advertiser also recognised that Hotham had his work cut out. He had to deal with a whole army of lazy and incompetent hangers-on, indolent, careless, incorrigible; men given jobs on the goldfields simply because they could not be kept sober in town. There was also the small matter of how to fix the massively unbalanced budget left by La Trobe’s administration.
CHARLES HOTHAM
CAPTAIN OF A SINKING SHIP
WRONG MAN IN THE WRONG PLACE AT THE WRONG TIME
BORN Suffolk, 1806
DIED Melbourne, 31 December 1855
ARRIVED June 1854
AGE AT EUREKA 48
CHILDREN None
FAQ Distinguished naval career. Sailed the world. Disappointed to be made Governor of Victoria in 1853—he wanted a posting in India.
When Sir Charles announced that he and his wife would leave the comfort of their Toorak mansion to visit the goldfields, the news was taken as a sure sign that restitution was imminent. Ellen Young wrote another poem, the first of her offerings to be published in the Ballarat Times, and included Lady Hotham in her salutation.
And let his fair, accomplish’d, gentle bride,
Her equal due—share in his fame, world-wide.
On 10 December 1853, aged 36 and fifteen years a widow, Jane married Sir Charles Hotham, who had been appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria just four days earlier. She knew what she was signing up for. Lady Hotham’s new life would take her far away from Somerset garden parties and court appearances routinely noted in The Times. And by all accounts, she was more suited to the times and the task ahead than her stiff-upper-lip new husband.
LADY JANE SARAH HOTHAM (NEE HOOD)
THE MERRY WIDOW
QUEEN BEE WHO DIDN’T MIND GETTING DOWN AND DIRTY WITH THE DIGGERS
BORN St Marylebone, England, 1817
DIED London, 1907
ARRIVED June 1854, on the Queen of the South
AGE AT EUREKA 37
CHILDREN None
FAQ English gentry, related to Lord Nelson. Widow. Married Sir Charles Hotham, newly appointed Governor of Victoria, in December 1853. Toured goldfields. Received letters and petitions from aggrieved diggers and wives.
ARCHIVE Hotham Papers, Hull University Archives, DDHO/10/42
Of the two Hothams, it was Jane who proved more adaptable to the colonial circumstances. Journalists noted that she was gracious, open, and perpetually cheerful. She appeared to greet every new situation with wide-eyed enthusiasm. She threw dinner parties every week, and invited all the best people in the colony, as William Kelly described the squattocracy, but also those who, before striking gold, never trod on a carpeted floor.
Lady Hotham’s affability was often contrasted to the unbending nature of her husband.
She also took to the streets. Before leaving for a tour of the diggings, Sir Charles and Lady Hotham attended a tradesman’s ball at the Criterion Hotel. There, noted Kelly, they met an assemblage of hard-brushed, shiny-haired operatives, publicans, corporations and small shopkeepers, with their wives and daughters, girthed in silk or satin, and moist with mock eau-de-cologne. It was a tough crowd: common, aspirational, newly rich, starstruck.
Lady Hotham, with the consummate tact of her sex, merrily drank a low-rent brandy cocktail at the urging of one of the guests. Her husband bristled at the vulgarity of it all.
On the goldfields, Lady Hotham performed an equivalent act of slumming it. In Ballarat, she went without Sir Charles to Black Hill to view the mining operations there, and made a distinct impression.
It was indeed a grand and gratifying sight, wrote the Diggers Advocate, to see her Ladyship shaking hands and exchanging civilities with the clay-besmeared but generous-hearted diggers…scattering to the winds the almost blinding cloud of aristocratic prejudice.
One miner was delighted to observe her ladyship breaking and examining bits of clay in her white, delicate little hand and talking and smiling to the people about her all the while…her shoes and stockings all over mud, she doesn’t care a straw—she is joyous, and evidently happy.
But Lady Hotham was not merely content to get down and dirty for the fun of it. When the people threw up a hearty three cheers for Hotham and his lady, she turned around to face the crowd, her eyes beaming with delight and face suffused with gladness. She smiled, not with the cold dignity of a high born dame but with holiday glee. She said plainly, ‘Well, I declare, these diggers are, after all, fine hearty fellows; I’ll speak to Charles to be kind to the poor fellows, when we get back to town again’. Lady Hotham’s words and deeds seemed to warrant the conviction, held by Ellen Young, that the Hothams would make the necessary changes to blow the faltering ship of Victoria out of its doldrums.
Indeed, more people shared Ellen Young’s confidence than George Francis Train’s doubts. Shopkeepers thought their trade would increase. Landowners thought the value of their property would rise. Diggers thought their licence fees would be reduced and their grievances sympathetically heard. So they thought.