Person Page - 47365

     Edmund Barton was born on 18 January 1849 at Glebe, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia^G.¹ He was the son of William Giles Barton and Mary Louisa Whydah.² He was baptised on 4 July 1849 at Parish of St James, County Cumberland, New South Wales, Australia^G.³ He married Jane Mason Ross on 28 December 1877 at Watt Street Presbyterian manse, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia^G.¹ He died on 7 January 1920 at age 70 at Medlow Bath, New South Wales, Australia^G, NSW BDM index no. 7298/1920.^1,4 He was buried on 9 January 1920 at South Head General Cemetery, Old South Head Road, Vaucluse, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia^G, Anglican section.⁵
     He was Lawyer; judge; politician. He was educated Fort Street Model School; Sydney Grammar School; B.A (1868) and M.A (1870) University of Sydney.⁶

     Jane Mason Ross was born in 1851 at London, England^G.¹ She married Edmund Barton, son of William Giles Barton and Mary Louisa Whydah, on 28 December 1877 at Watt Street Presbyterian manse, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia^G.² She died on 23 March 1938 at Darling Point, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia^G, NSW BDM index no. 4792/1938 / died at her residence, Mona Flats, Mona Road, Darling Point..^3,4
     From 28 December 1877, her married name became Barton.

     William Giles Barton was born on 7 June 1795 at London, England^G.¹ He married Mary Louisa Whydah, daughter of unknown Whydah and Sophia Synett, in 1827 at St George Hanover Square, London, England^G.² He died on 6 May 1881 at age 85 at Sydney, New South Wales, Australia^G.¹ He was buried at Camperdown Cemetery, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia^G.¹
     He was Accountant; financial agent; stockbroker. William Barton was the youngest son of a London perfumier, a member of a merchant family with interests in the East Indies. He had not prospered greatly despite the mentoring of an elder brother, until in May 1827 the opportunity came of appointment as accountant to the Australian Agricultural Company. Formed three years earlier as a result of lobbying by the Macarthur family, the Company was one of the first attempts to mobilize British investment by capitalizing on the promise of an expanding wool industry to acquire large tracts of Australian land. With £1 million behind it the Company was willing to pay the handsome salary of £500 a year for a smart young executive to go to New South Wales as accountant and secretary. William Barton’s family supported his application. He had a seven-year contract, but he would be best served, wrote his elder brother, by a stay of at least fourteen years in a land flowing with milk and honey. In this hopeful frame of mind William and Mary Louisa were married in June 1827 and embarked upon the Frederick for the five-month voyage to Australia.

William Giles Barton resided at St. Botolph Bishopsgate, London, at the time of his marriage in 1827. William Barton came to Australia in 1827 as the first resident secretary of the Australian Agricultural Company (the baptismal certificate of daughter Elizabeth in 1831 identifies him as accountant to the Australian Agricultural Company). He resigned about 1832 and became an estate agent and a pioneer of share trading in Sydney, and Sydney’s first stockbroker.

Unincorporated joint stock companies operating under deeds of settlement had been formed in Britain for a long time but had increased in numbers as the railway boom occurred in the 1830s and 1840s. A similar development took place in New South Wales with the formation of several banks and other companies such as The Australian Agricultural Company (1824) and Australian Gas Light Company (1836) and others associated with the pastoral boom of the 1830s. The extent of company formations and share trading in New South Wales can be seen from newspaper commentary in 1836 which warned that there appeared to be “a sort of mania for the formation of companies”. In 1835 the first share list was published by William Barton, an early stockbroker. He also published a book on New South Wales companies [Particulars of Joint Stock Institutions in New South Wales, J. Tegg & Co., Sydney, 1838, reissued in 1839] which is evidence of strong investor interest in share investment.

William Barton soon went broke: he applied for and received a certificate from the Chief Commissioner of Insolvent Estates in 19 April 1844.

Newspaper birth notices for daughters Mary and Anna show William Giles’s residence in 1831 and 1833 as Port Stephens. In the wedding notice for daughter Alice in 1865 his residence is noted as Cumberland Street, Sydney.

William Barton appears to have made several return visits to England with his family. William and his wife and four children are reported arriving in Sydney on 26 January 1833 aboard the ship, Warrior, of 478 tons, from London and Hobart.
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(Obituary from The Brisbane Courier, Monday 9 May 1881, reprinted in The Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser, Saturday 21 May 1881.)

Obituary of an Old Colonist.

Eighteenth century men are getting scarcer and scarcer amongst us, and apart from that, while Government debentures, bank and insurance shares, are matters so well known, the death of the pioneer stock and share broker of Australia forms an event worthy of note. The subject of this notice, William Barton, Esq., was born in London 7th June, 1795, and was educated at Christ's Hospital, better known then as the 'Blue Coat School.'

In 1810 he entered the office of an old share-broking firm, Messrs. Barwis and Co., the senior partner of which, born in 1740, adhered still in 1810 to the cocked hat, powdered pigtail, knee breeches, and silver buckles of George the Second's days. In 1827 Mr. Barton (through the influence of his brother, a partner of Mr. Crawford, M.P. for London) received the appointment of accountant and secretary to the Australian Agricultural Company at Port Stephens, New South Wales, arriving in Sydney in the days when the Circular Quay site was a sandy beach and Hunter-street a cottage garden, watered by the unpolluted Tank stream. The means of communication between London and Sydney was then by small 200-ton barques, which also carried out stud stock for the A. A. Company. Mr. Oxley, the old Surveyor-General of New South Wales (who explored the Lachlan in 1817), died soon after Mr. Barton's arrival, and attending the funeral was one of his first reminiscences after landing. Residents in Sydney fifty years ago will remember Mr. Barton's action at law against Sir Edward Parry, the commissioner of the A. A. Company, in which he recovered a verdict, and his disagreement with whom caused his retirement from the company's employ. The quarrel excited much public attention in England at the time (1832), the John Bull, Spectator, and other English journals of the date warmly espousing the secretary's cause against the commissioner. Mr. Barton was the first, and for many years the only, sharebroker in Sydney (or, indeed, south of the line), and he was instrumental in forming some of the leading Sydney banks, insurance, and other companies during the last thirty years. His firm was successively William Barton, Barton and Son, Barton and Melhado, the business now being in the hands of Melhado and Curtis. In 1873 he retired to Brisbane in this colony, of which he was formerly a magistrate, and the climate of which he preferred to Sydney, whither he however returned in 1878. He was hale and hearty to this date, and had steered cleared of paralysis, gout, and other evils that beset the old ; but, losing his eyesight soon after, his active spirit gave way under the loss, and he died on the 6th instant, unimpaired in mental vigour, at the residence of his youngest son, Edmund Barton (the member for Wellington, in New South Wales), and was interred in the Camperdown Cemetery in Sydney, at the spot where it looks out on the Lane Cove and Parramatta River country to the north. He leaves a numerous family, married and settled in London, Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. Before concluding this notice we would express regret that these ever-parting links with the bygone were not, more of them, writing men to hand down the better traditions of our early colonial days, and so we hope to be excused for rescuing one of them from oblivion.

Many people will remember Tawell, the little Quaker, who was hanged in England for the murder, by strychnine, of a servant girl near Windsor. Tawell formerly lived in Sydney, carried on a large business there, and resided in a cottage in Macquarie-street north. Tawell wishing to return to England, realised all his property except some £7000 worth of bills, and he asked Mr. Barton (then a broker in Macquarie Place) to get them discounted for him, offering him the usual commission of 1 per cent. Mr. Barton took them to several bill-brokers, and as there were good names (such as Richard Jones and William Walker) on some of them, one discounter offered a cheque for £5000 for the lot. This, being the best tender, was reported to Tawell (then a highly respected and respectable man), and he said to Mr. Barton, 'Friend, the offer is not enough. I was prepared to lose 20 or 25 per cent on the bills to get away quickly, but that is too much to spare.' The securities were returned, and Mr. Barton was surprised to receive a visit, some days later, from Tawell, who said, 'Friend, I have been thinking that thou didst thy best in that affair ; that it was not thy fault, but my convenience, that I did not elect to take the highest offer thou didst elicit, so here is thy commission on the best tender,' and Tawell laid a cheque for £50 on the desk and walked out. This true story is interesting as showing what depths of good and evil there are in most human natures, for a more unostentatious act of pure honesty and rectitude was scarcely ever recorded, and yet this man committed atrocious murder under subsequent temptation. No man knows his own heart till he is tried.

Mr. Barton, like Charles Lamb, was in 1825 a clerk in the East India House before he left England, and also in the firm of Stephen Thornton and Co., Russia merchants, of old Broad-street, of which Tooke was a member. 'Servant girlism' was rife in Sydney fifty years ago. In 1830 Mr, Barton had occasion to visit England on business connected with the A. A. Company, and at that time there was only one hackney carriage in Sydney, and this had been secured by his wife's nursemaid for her own luggage, and as the ship was just sailing, Mr. Barton had to employ a dray for his; but Sydney and its hackney vehicles have increased somewhat since then.

The subject of this notice was essentially one of the old school, with a strong element of the eighteenth century 'backbone' of Palmerston's era in his character ; he was the trusted agent and investor for many of our leading colonists, past and present ; and when Sydney, like New York, is old enough to look back to its early 'knickerbocker' days, with some degree of reverence, the name of William Barton (1795-1881) will be enrolled amongst its patriarchs attaining the same age as Thomas Carlyle.^{3,2,4,5,6,7,8,9,10}

     Mary Louisa Whydah was born circa 1809. She was the daughter of unknown Whydah and Sophia Synett.¹ She married William Giles Barton in 1827 at St George Hanover Square, London, England^G.² She died on 4 May 1872 at Woollahra, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia^G, NSW BDM index no. 2266/1872.³
     Her married name became Barton. She was Girls school proprietor.

     George Burnett Barton was born NSW BDM index no. V1836294 21/1836 on 9 December 1836 at Sydney, New South Wales, Australia^G.¹ He was the son of William Giles Barton and Mary Louisa Whydah.² He married, firstly, Margaret Isabella Parnell in July 1865 at Holy Trinity Church of England, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia^G.¹ He married, secondly, Laura Maude Wilshire in 1900 at Bondi, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia^G, in a NSW BDM index no. 7318/1900 marriage.¹ He died on 12 September 1901 at age 64 at Goulburn, New South Wales, Australia^G.
     He was Lawyer, journalist; historian. He was educated University of Sydney.

     Laura Maude Wilshire married George Burnett Barton, son of William Giles Barton and Mary Louisa Whydah, in 1900 at Bondi, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia^G, in a NSW BDM index no. 7318/1900 marriage.¹ She died in 1919 at Burwood, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia^G, NSW BDM index no. 16837/1919.
     From 1900, her married name became Barton.

     Margaret Isabella Parnell was born NSW BDM index no. V1843245 158/1843 in 1843 at Maitland, New South Wales, Australia^G. She married George Burnett Barton, son of William Giles Barton and Mary Louisa Whydah, in July 1865 at Holy Trinity Church of England, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia^G.¹
     From July 1865, her married name became Barton.

     May Barton was born NSW BDM index no. 976/1866 in 1866 at Sydney, New South Wales, Australia^G. She was the daughter of George Burnett Barton and Margaret Isabella Parnell.¹ She died in 1929.²

     George W. Barton was born NSW BDM index no. 1129/1867 in 1867 at Sydney, New South Wales, Australia^G. He was the son of George Burnett Barton and Margaret Isabella Parnell.¹

     Edith M. Barton was born NSW BDM index no. 1106/1868 in 1868 at Sydney, New South Wales, Australia^G. She was the daughter of George Burnett Barton and Margaret Isabella Parnell.¹