Eliza Grenier,
the third daughter of Thomas and Mary (née Pannell)
Grenier was born in Brighton, Sussex, on 9 August 1836.
In keeping with family tradition, she was christened
there in St Nicholas’s Church of England on 11 September
1836. Together with her parents and her surviving
sisters, Mary Ann (b. 10 September 1834) and Sarah (b. 2
April 1838), she left St Katherine’s Dock, London, as a
steerage passenger on the 658-ton barque Perfect
(Captain William Snell) on 1 October 1838 bound for a
new life in Australia. The ship docked in Sydney on 31
January 1839.

Fuller details of Eliza’s
siblings and of her childhood in Sydney, Brighton (near
Melbourne) and Kororareka on the Bay of Islands in New
Zealand may be found in this researcher’s book,
Thomas and Mary Grenier: Brisbane Pioneers (Easter
2002) and in a supplement to it (June 2004). See also
the entries on her parents in this volume. It suffices
to say here that, after about a year in Australia and
several years in New Zealand, whence the family fled
during the Maori uprising in 1845, the Greniers settled
in South Brisbane and later at Cooper’s Plains.
On 23 August 1854 Eliza
married Henry Watson of North Brisbane in a
ceremony presided over by a Presbyterian clergyman, the
Reverend Alexander Waters Sinclair. The witnesses to
this union were the bride’s father and Dr Frederick
James Barton, formerly a respected young surgeon at the
Brisbane Hospital and, at the time of the nuptials, the
proprietor of a drug business in Queen Street where,
among other services, he provided ‘bleeding, cupping,
[and] tooth drawing’.
Eliza and Henry—who is
listed in contemporary records as a storekeeper in Grey
Street (1856), a mariner (1859), a merchant (1864), more
specifically as a wine and spirit merchant (1865), and a
commission agent—were the parents of three sons and one
daughter: Henry George Thomas (b. 21 November 1856; d. 2
December 1889), Thomas William (b. 4 March 1859; d. 19
February 1860), George Alexander (b. 20 April 1862; d.
24 May 1862), and Mary Ellen (b. 2 September 1863; d. 3
May 1935).
Henry and Eliza resided
for most of their married life at South Brisbane.
However, at the time of Henry’s death, only ten years
after their wedding, he and his wife and their two
surviving children were living in William Street, North
Brisbane, just over the river in the vicinity of the
Commissariat Store. Stricken with an ‘effusion on the
brain’, Henry was treated by Dr Francis Xavier Heeney
and died at home on 17 December 1864 aged 39. The family
cannot have
been resident there
for very long; for, in the newspaper notice of the birth
of the youngest child in September 1863, their address
is given as Elizabeth Street.
After a service in St
John’s Church conducted by the Reverend John Tomlinson,
Henry’s remains were interred in the Paddington Cemetery
(plot 255), the burial place of two of his sons and of
his wife’s brother Thomas (d. 25 August 1857). The
undertaker was George Barney Petrie and the official
witnesses of the burial were Thomas Grenier and Robert
Davidson.
Eliza, widowed at the age
of 28, was left to raise young two children. Fortunately
for her and for them, she met an eligible Irish-born
bachelor and found the prospect of rebuilding her life
with him much to her liking. On 19 October 1865, ten
months after Henry’s untimely demise, Eliza remarried.
Her new husband was William Ewer Benn, the
son of James Webb Benn and Christiana Mackay (or McCaig)
who travelled to Australia with their young family on
the 467-ton Livingston (Captain Rickerby) in
1841.
From 1866 to 1869 William,
a respected publican, was the licensee of the Plough Inn
in Stanley Street, South Brisbane. Presumably this
became Eliza’s new home until her husband took over the
Royal Hotel in Queen Street, opposite the General Post
Office (1869-70), and later the Coach and Horses Hotel
at Oxley on the Brisbane to Ipswich road (1871-75).
William and Eliza were
blessed with five children: Eliza Christiana Benn (b. 6
June 1866), William Webb Benn (b. 7 March 1868), Minnie
Kate Jessie Benn (b. 12 September 1869), John Ewer Benn
(b. 23 June 1871), and Jessie Jobina Benn (b. 21 July
1873; d. 23 July 1879).
Despite the ministrations
of Dr Edward Robert Webb MRCS, an assistant surgeon at
the Woogaroo Asylum, and the solicitous bedside
assistance of several of her closest relatives, Eliza
died at Oxley on 17 June 1875, about three days after
she was stricken with apoplexy; and a pall of sadness
descended upon the family. Only 38 at the time, she left
seven children of whom Henry, the eldest, was almost 19
and Jessie, the youngest, a month short of her 2nd
birthday. Inevitably, at the tender age of 12, the
grieving Mary Ellen must have had additional
responsibilities thrust upon her in caring for the
younger children.
|
Unable to rear the
children without assistance, William availed of the
generous offer of Eliza’s brother and sister-in-law,
George Alexander and Sarah Mary Agnes Grenier, to help
out. At the time of Eliza’s death, they had five
surviving children of their own. It is not known whether
they took over the upbringing of the two Watson
children; but is surely significant that Mary Ellen
Watson later chose to be married at their residence.
George and Sarah were definitely involved in the care of
the two boys, Willy and Jack Benn. Their sisters lived
for a time with their uncle and aunt, Joseph and Sarah
(née Grenier) Wonderley, in Toowoomba. This would
explain how the youngest, Jessie Jobina Benn, came to be
buried in the Wonderley plot in the Toowoomba Cemetery
(grave No. 2088) after her death on 23 July 1879, just
two days after her 6th birthday.
Turning his back on the
hotel business, William Ewer Benn moved to Kangaroo
Point where, as an item in Thomas Grenier’s last will
and testament (dated 17 June 1877) indicates, he became
a boatbuilder. On 13 November 1882 he and Annie Bruce,
a widow, were married by the Reverend Colin McCulloch
according to the rites of the Presbyterian Church at
‘The Manse’, Wickham Terrace, Brisbane. The witnesses
were Edward Reynolds (the husband since 20 December 1876
of the groom’s niece Annie Christina Blue) and Jemima
McCulloch (née Birnie, the minister’s wife). William
Benn and Annie Bruce were then aged 46 and 28
respectively.
Annie, the daughter of
William and Annie (née Bannister) Chapman, was born in
Windsor, New South Wales. Married first to John Charles
Bruce, she was the mother of five children: Jessie Ann
(b. 2 July 1872), Lydia May (b. 17 January 1874), John
Charles (b. 12 June 1875), Edithe Mary (b. 28 August
1876), and William John (b. 28 July 1878). She died in
the Brisbane Hospital on 17 June 1892 and was buried in
the Toowong Cemetery two days later.
Evidence suggests that
William Benn retired from work some time before the
wedding of his daughter Minnie Kate Jessie Benn and
William Francis Rodney Boyce on 15 August 1894—the year
in which he turned fifty-seven. Though he described
himself in 1892 as a boatbuilder in the legal papers
winding up his brother John’s estate, he is referred to
simply as a ‘gentleman’ in their marriage certificate,
apparently without occupation.
Minnie and her husband, a
solicitor, lived in Toowoomba for some years before
moving to Gordon Street, Charters Towers, where, as
records indicate, they resided between 1899 and 1912.
They cared for William Benn in his declining years; and
he was living with them when he died on 13 August 1909
at the age of seventy-two. One of Frank and Minnie’s
children remembers him ‘as a smallish bearded man,
alert, active and promptly irately responsive to teasing
from his grandsons’.
|