An Educational Venture The Bennett Family in England

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 22, Issue 2, 1 October 1989, Page 99

An Educational Venture The Bennett Family in England

BERYL HUGHES

On 18 February 1878, the Parramatta sailed from Sydney, carrying away to England Agnes Bennett and her seven children. Her husband, William Bennett, Commissioner for Roads and Bridges in New South Wales, stood on the wharf. He wrote several times to his wife about the last glimpse of his family, when she lifted two-year old Harry to the rails. Mr Bennett did not see his children for three and a half years. He was never to see his wife again. The purpose of the move to England was educational. There were no secondary schools for girls in Sydney and the two older girls, as well as five-year old Agnes, later a well-known Wellington doctor, had been taught by their mother. I presume that the boys had been taught at home, too, when they were small but they had also been to school in Sydney. There is nothing in the correspondence about this except that the travelling had proved a nuisance. The Bennetts lived in Neutral Bay and communications between the North Shore and the city before the ferries operated were poor; Mr Bennett often rowed himself to work. There are no letters from the period immediately before the family left to tell about the decision-making behind the move. In their biography of Dr Agnes Bennett, who was one of the children, Cecil and Celia Manson wrote, ‘Her parents had always planned to have the children educated in England at modern schools , which does not take one very far. But by exploring the lives of the parents, I think I can make the move intelligible.

William Bennett was bom in Dublin in 1824, son of a traffic-manager on the Union Canal. After his father’s death, he was articled at sixteen as an engineer. He had outstanding abilities and soon outgrew Ireland. After working in South America for some years, he arrived in Sydney. He reached his position of Commissioner and his salary of £I,OOO p.a. through great skill as an engineer and as an administrator, and hard work. 2 He was thirty-nine when he married, fifty-four when the family left, aware that he might die before the children were established in life. He believed that good careers were essential if middle-class standards were to be kept. Mrs Bennett also had middle-class aspirations and no rich relations. She was born in England but went when young with her family to New York. Her father made a living by tracing pedigrees at the New

York College of Arms and Pedigree, 649 Broadway, which he had established. He and his wife let part of their house and did a little importing. One of Mrs Bennett’s sisters worked in a mantilla showroom but, wrote her mother, ‘The owner is a friend of Papa’s. It is a very respectable position’. No doubt, but the family’s situation does seem rather precarious. I find it easy to see how Mrs Bennett, too, would welcome steady careers for her children.

Mrs Bennett’s brothers do not appear to have considered the United States as a land of opportunity. Three of the four left in their teens, one, who was drowned not many years later, for New Zealand and two for Australia. Only Henry, an opera singer, remained in America. William and Agnes Bennett met when, aged only nineteen, she travelled alone to the southern hemisphere to check on her brothers’ welfare. 3 A few years after their marriage in 1862, he built a house in Neutral Bay and called it Honda after a place in South America, which he had visited. Honda was for him the fulfilment of a dream, but his wife hated being left with babies (and a servant or two) in an area where for years there were only five other houses. Letters from the early period of the marriage reveal her unhappiness when he was away and the tension between them. 4 She was strong and independent, not one to give in easily. Mr Bennett took everything the hard way. He admitted to being a ‘real old croaker’ and a worrier. Neither of them had much sense of humour.

Who decided on the move to England? Presumably they were in agreement. He could hardly compel her to go against her will, she could hardly compel him to spend almost all his salary on the venture and to endure great loneliness. Mrs Bennett sometimes wrote 5 as though she were carrying out his intentions: ‘your wishes ever uppermost in my efforts & thoughts’ (letter of 18 December 1878) and ‘my charge’, ‘my mission’, and ‘lf I can only keep my health and fulfil my duty and charge to your satisfaction’. But he wrote (2 September 1878) ‘the great reason that I consented to you going that you might not be a slave to the caprices of Australian domestics’ and ‘it was one of my great inducements to part with you to think that you yourself would have some rest and pleasure’ and ‘one of my reasons for letting you go was that you might have some pleasure’. These words make me think that she may have been the initiator. She was a forceful woman with a more clear-cut personality than her husband, as he recognised: ‘you have so much more decision & force of character in the matter of decision’.

I am inclined to think that the idea of the move originated with her but that he laid down the rules for the children’s education. A stay of about three or four years was planned. Neither guessed the problems this would bring: he found the loneliness more crushing than he had expected, she found the practical details burdensome and there were unexpected difficulties with the children’s health.

The family stayed a few weeks in London, then after taking advice from friends moved to Cheltenham which had the attractions of good society and good schools. Cheltenham Ladies’ College, where the famous Miss Beale was head, was one of the top girls’ schools in England and one of the largest, with almost five hundred pupils. A 1 and Fan coped satisfactorily, a tribute to their mother’s teaching. Agnes, the brightest of the seven, began in the kindergarten but was soon promoted to the main school, where she was the youngest pupil. The boys attended Cheltenham College, which was never as famous as the girls’ school. They settled in less easily than their sisters.

Health quickly became a problem. The isolated existence which the girls —and Harry —had led made them vulnerable to infectious diseases once they started school. Fanny was asthmatic and there was fear of tuberculosis. After a few months she was sent to Bournemouth which has a better climate than Cheltenham. She went to school there and lived in a boarding-house for schoolgirls, which must have been an exemplary establishment since Mrs Bennett had nothing but praise for it. Mr Bennett’s letters rolled on steadily. Long, laborious, with the last pages usually crossed, they must have presented difficulties to his wife, who had to try to carry out his directions and respond to his changing ideas. He had definite views on education but a limited understanding of the way that schools worked. Mrs Bennett had to tell him more than once that you could not order the subjects you wanted; you took what schools offered.

Both parents faced hardships. We may suppose that they missed each other, although he wrote of missing the children much more than of missing her. He spent his spare time in visiting people with whom Mrs Bennett and the girls corresponded; sometimes he made copies of the letters these people had received from them. He took great care of his own letters from the family, eventually giving Frank, the oldest son, a separate file. He led a cheerless existence, camping out in a room or two and looked after by a handyman. Since he could not return hospitality, he seldom accepted it. Over his bed he hung a spade of Harry’s and two hats of the older boys. But he did not pine away; his weight rose from fifteen and a half stone to nearly eighteen. Mrs Bennett was faced with heavy responsibilities; she had to choose houses and schools and justify her choices to her husband. She had to itemise her expenditure carefully. I doubt if she washed a cup or peeled a potato (though she helped to put out a fire) but she was busy. Harry did not go to school and she kept him with her most of the time. She heard the lessons of the other six children and supervised their homework. The girls were with her most afternoons, since they had the short hours typical of nineteenth century girls’ private schools. She shopped for the children’s clothes, repaired and refashioned them. She

wrote long letters to her husband, who wanted a progress report on the older ones in every letter. She had to make him understand that their progress could not be quantified weekly. As well as two excellent servants whom she kept throughout her stay in England, she had a succession of nursery-governesses. Miss Chambers, an Australian, accompanied the family to England. On the Parramatta she was at times seasick, at times flirtatious. In Cheltenham, she asked for Thursday evenings off to attend church but was found to be taking secret French lessons. A few weeks later, she became delirious with fever and violent, and was then shipped home, having to pay half her fare herself. Mr Bennett was amazed at her presumption when she later accosted him cheerfully in Sydney, apparently unaware of her disgrace. Two or three other governesses succeeded her; at one point Mrs Bennett had fifty replies to an advertisement for the position.

It was hoped that the three or four year stay would give A 1 and Fan a secondary education which would complete their schooling. The boys were to get a good grounding which would give them an advantage over other boys in Australia. Their father’s chief concern was careers for the boys, though he wanted to equip the girls, too, to earn a living. ‘I would bring all the children up thoroughly to understand they must work for their living, life is uncertain dear wife & so are colonial appointments. . . .’ (21 May 1878) He did not discuss careers for the girls, understandably, since there were hardly any; there were occupations. He hoped they would not have to teach, since it was a poor livelihood but he looked on teaching as something they could fall back on if necessary; possibly they could run their own school at Honda. He wanted A 1 and Fan to be taught modelling, drawing, telegraphy, astronomy, electricity and galvanism and suggested that they might earn their livings as engravers. There is virtually no mention of the main occupation for girls at that time, marriage, even though A 1 was seventeen and a half when the correspondence ended. Mr Bennett several times mentioned that the girls might care for their parents in their old age.

Mrs Bennett wanted the girls to be well taught and to make the most of their opportunities, but she was temperate in her support for women’s education. ‘I am rather afraid of overtaxing the brain’, she wrote, ‘there have been several such cases of it in the Ladies College & I really do think the education of women is being overdone, with the numberless domestic and other cares that are allotted to them’. Although Mr Bennett was concerned with careers for the older boys, he did not specially favour them in other ways. He was fond of all his children but his preferences went like this: Harry, then Agnes (‘my two little dots’, as he called them) then A 1 and Fan, with the three eldest boys at the bottom. But Frank as the oldest son was the most important in career terms, followed by Alf and Wal.

Frank, although not clever, was conscientious and hardworking. Mr Bennett had decided I think before the family left Sydney that Frank was to be a doctor. Frank was squeamish about blood and would go out of the room if anyone cut a finger; he resisted the idea of a medical career. Mr Bennett pressed on with his arguments. Occasionally he wrote that he did not want to force Frank but he appears to be doing precisely that. The plan was to leave Frank behind to study medicine when the family returned. Although Sydney University had a medical faculty dating from 1856, no medical courses for students were yet available.

If Frank refused to become a doctor, and with other professions mentally reserved for Alf and Wal, Mr Bennett was afraid that Frank might have to be put to a trade, to be a cabinet-maker or a sugarrefiner. ‘Everything is so completely overdone over here’, he complained of Australia. ‘Swarms of lawyers Architects bank clerks it is impossible to get a lad in anywhere. Trades are the only thing’. But in general it was the professions that Mr Bennett went over and over, though he usually drew the line at lawyers, ‘a profession of tricks’. The next boy, Alf, was considered the weakest in intellect, health and character (‘like my unfortunate brother George’, said Mr Bennett). Mr Bennett had a solution. ‘Alfy I think should be with me and stick to Govt he I think will not be very bright & that is the best line for him’. Part of the point of this was that his father could look after him.

Towards the end of their stay, Alf broke his arm, which Mr Bennett characteristically treated as a major calamity which might blight his career. He began to search for other possibilities, writing, ‘I think we must bring him up at the University’ (he sometimes wrote as though Alf were half-witted) and ‘he is very Quiet do you think he would like the church?’

The third boy, Wal, was the brightest of the three, a lively and likeable child. Wal wanted to be a squatter —so did Frank —but Mr Bennett could not consider this because of lack of capital. He reviewed various careers for Wal, including being a chemist and making up prescriptions for Frank. Or Wal might go into a merchant’s office in Sydney or farm in Queensland with Mrs Bennett’s brother. He could even be a doctor if Frank could not be driven to it. ‘I should like to have one boy a doctor’, Mr Bennett admitted. Doctors at this time were far from being the godlike beings they later turned themselves into. I suspect that what attracted Mr Bennett was that developments in anaesthetics and antiseptic surgery in the middle of the nineteenth century made medicine appear modern, scientific, progressive. Another attraction may have been that medicine, unlike most of the professions at the time, had already developed a definite career structure. Mr Bennett did not apparently consider his own profession, engineering, for his sons, unless we count his taking the least capable

of them, Alf, into his own office so that he could be looked after. A strictly honest man himself (and rather a touchy one), Mr Bennett loathed the involvement with politicians which his work brought. It was decided that Wal should have a career in the navy. Wal was content and Mr Bennett asked the Governor of New South Wales to nominate him for a cadetship. After nomination, he would have to go for an interview and sit an examination in competition with four other boys. Mr Bennett knew the arrangements well in advance and laid down guidelines. Wal was to be Brisk and smart in manner without being saucy’. Mrs Bennett must have him ‘neatly and plainly dressed, not too young looking no colour except grey with a little dark coat and round hat or cap with short hair & very clean hands and nails’. Meanwhile Wal must prepare for his naval career with plenty of dictation and to steady his nerves he must practise climbing the towers of the Crystal Palace, and if the captain would permit, the rigging of the Parramatta when she was next in port.

These instructions about climbing —which were never carried out were given after the family had moved in late 1879 to Dulwich, on the southern outskirts of London. This was done to bring Fan back into the family, with the hope that Dulwich would be better for her than Cheltenham. Fan wore a respirator in the streets and stayed healthy. The boys were to attend Dulwich College but had first to pass an entrance exam. Wal passed, Frank and Alf failed. They were coached hard by tutors. Frank, aged sixteen now, rose at five or six, swotted all day and was seldom in bed before eleven. 6 After a few months the two boys passed but then had to face a stiff regime. School was followed by drill sessions, more private coaching and then homework supervised by their mother. Neither parent favoured sport; as Mrs Bennett wrote, ‘I do not think any of them should play football, an accident might keep them away from school for a long time’. Athletics were considered undesirable for the same reason.

Their time at Dulwich College overlapped by a few weeks with that of Alexander Turnbull. He was born in the same year as Alf so it is possible they were in the same class. 7 The letters do not refer to the Turnbulls. The girls attended Dulwich Girls’ High School, one of the Girls’ Public Day School Trust schools, and seem to have been happy there. Mrs Bennett preferred the headmistress to Miss Beale but did not say why. Mrs Bennett was horrified to discover that her girls might sit next to tradesmen’s daughters but came to see that this might have its good side. 8 She would not allow the girls to accept invitations to other girls’ homes on the grounds that she did not know their mothers and did not have time to get to know them. Living on the edge of London the children were taken to see the

sights. They glimpsed Queen Victoria, whom Mrs Bennett called ‘a dreadful bundle’. The older ones went to the opera, to hear the great mezzo-soprano, Zelia Trebelli, in Carmen. ‘A fine opera’, wrote Mrs Bennett, ‘but the characters lower-class, the heroine a factory girl. We should not choose the same opera again’. Towards the end of the family’s stay, Mr Bennett grew despondent, wondering if the boys’ undistinguished progress justified all the trouble and loneliness. He urged his wife to push them even harder. ‘I am so afraid’, he wrote, ‘of their not being any brighter than the ordinary colonial boys they will have to compete with in the struggle of life here & indeed it is a greater struggle than in England’.

Mrs Bennett did not believe the children would have done better in Australia. ‘The girls certainly would not and Walter is certainly on the way to be far ahead of what Frank was. Our boys are not particularly bright but I think have done as much as abilities and health permit’. The girls did better than their brothers. Fan gained a prize at school which earned her in addition a white camellia, A 1 was awarded a certificate and a red one. Mrs Bennett thought more highly of girls’ schools in England than of boys’; she considered correcdy that too much Latin was taught at boys’ schools and that the mathematics teaching was inadequate. Mr Bennett continued to worry about his three older sons, then aged eleven to sixteen. Occasionally, he wrote as though irrevocable steps had been taken, writing, ‘Poor fellows it would have been better for them if they had been able to follow the paths I have traced out for them’. And of Alfy, aged about thirteen, he wrote sadly, ‘I sometimes think I should have selected some other line for him’, as though no change was possible.

The parents began to discuss the date of return. Mr Bennett was torn between wanting them back and wanting them to get the utmost benefit from their stay. He suggested later and later dates; December 1881, March 1882. Mrs Bennett felt bound to stay till December 1881, when WgJ would have heard the result of the naval examination. She proposed to leave immediately afterwards, bringing Wal back if he failed, leaving him in the navy’s care if he passed. She wanted to bring Frank back, too, so that he could take the medical courses that would soon be offered by the University of Sydney. (They began in 1883.) Mrs Bennett’s death from smallpox in June 1881 changed everything. A smallpox epidemic led her to have the children vaccinated but not herself, since she did not want a sore arm at a time when she might have to nurse the children. She intended to be vaccinated a week later but by then Harry had developed scarlet fever. She hardly left his side for ten days and was not vaccinated until after she had developed smallpox. Ironically, the children had little trouble with their vaccination.

The identification of her illness was delayed by her doctor’s insistence that all she had was a bilious attack, even after she had come out in spots, even though an epidemic was raging. Sixteen-year old Frank called on the doctor and convinced him that he was wrong. The children were sent to lodgings. Barred from school because of possible infection, they continued their studies. A 1 and Fan taught French and arithmetic to the younger ones and gave them dictation. Frank spend his days running messages between the doctors, the chemist and the house where his mother was dying. 9 Mr Bennett was telegraphed for and took the children back to Sydney except for Frank, whom he left in London to prepare for a medical course.

The long visit to England was over. Had the children gained great advantages in their careers from their stay in England? Mrs Bennett wrote (24 September 1879), I presume not really meaning it, that she would die rather than fail. I am inclined to say that she died and she failed and that her death and its consequences contributed to her failure. There are, of course, great difficulties involved in making judgments of this sort.

Mrs Bennett’s death, a result of the the visit to England (it is highly unlikely that she would have died of smallpox in Neutral Bay) can be counted as the major misfortune which ensued from it, since it involved considerable emotional trauma for the family. It led also to a curtailment of their stay by about six months, with a change of plans for some of the children. It brought, nineteen months after Mrs Bennett’s death, a very unwelcome stepmother. The death of the first Mrs Bennett, and then the arrival of the second, damaged the children’s relations with their father.

In itself the curtailment of their stay probably had little effect on most of the children, but because of it A 1 could not sit for the senior Cambridge examination for which she had been working. Perhaps that was of no great moment. Wal may have been more seriously affected. If he had sat the examination in November 1881 and had come out top of the five boys, he would have had a naval career, a different kind of life and possibly a happier one. Frank was affected, not so much by the shortening of the stay as by Mrs Bennett’s death. She had wanted Frank to return with her and I think she could have prevailed over her husband. She was in many ways the firmer of the two.

Almost the only source for what happened to the children back in Sydney is Mr Bennett’s letters to Frank but the run of these is very incomplete. 10 A 1 and Fan had, I think, no more schooling. They taught Agnes and Harry for some time and A 1 mothered all the younger ones. Alf and Wal went to school, possibly Sydney Grammar. Agnes eventually went to a school called Abbotsleigh and later attended Sydney Girls High School. After some years Harry went to a boarding school

in or near Sydney. Mr Bennett paid out considerable sums for their education, with a large slice going to Frank. 11 Their mother’s death brought the children into the sole care of a father whom they had not seen for three and a half years, fifty-seven-years old and I suspect taking his grief hard. Dr Agnes Bennett later wrote that her mother had mediated between them and their father. Now they used to run off and hide when they heard him coming. These difficult relations with Mr Bennett were made worse by his remarriage. His choice of wife was linked with the overseas venture. Her sister had taught A 1 in Dulwich and put Jane (the stepmother) in touch with the Bennetts when Jane arrived in Sydney for health reasons.

Jane was twenty-five, delicate and not at all capable. The children disliked her and in time relations became appalling. 13 There were faults on both sides (as Frank wrote later, ‘We are all masterful people and like our way’). But Jane’s letters over the years to Agnes 14 suggest that she was silly and tactless, or as Harry once called her, a ‘galoot’. She and Mr Bennett had two children, whom A 1 and Fan had to help to bring up. The animosity must have been distressing to Mr Bennett, whose letters to his first wife had rejoiced in the family harmony. There is a suggestion in the letters (it is not completely clear) that Alf and Wal as young adults refused to eat with their father and stepmother. It is possible that the miserable situation may have led to or accelerated the heart attack which killed him in 1889 at the age of sixty-five. His death left the family relatively poor and must have made more difficult the provision of tertiary education for the children, if indeed this was ever considered. Only Agnes, apart from Frank, had any and she won a state scholarship to Sydney University. The estate was valued at £BOOO but there was no pension. He had set up a trust to provide for his family. Only two of the nine children were working, Alf and Wal, twenty-one and twenty, and their wages were small.

I want to look now at the lives of the seven children and to try to estimate what the English venture had done for them. I intend to ask to what extent their parents’ hope that an English education would improve their opportunities for successful careers was realised; I intend to examine also the effects that their stay in England had on their future happiness. A 1 seems to have been crushed by the experience of bringing up the younger ones, batding with Jane on their behalf and later in keeping house for them. Agnes wrote of the life being taken out of A 1 by her responsibilities. In later life, Al’s gloomy religious outlook depressed her family. At the age of thirty-seven she trained in Liverpool as an

Anglican deaconess and then managed a girl’s hostel in India for some time. She also worked briefly in a mission to Maoris but there is virtually no evidence about this in the correspondence. In 1912, she asked Agnes if she could keep house for her in Wellington and Agnes very painfully had to refuse her. A 1 gave up work in her fifties and spent her later years in England. It is hard to think that her English education, even though she was reasonably successful at school, helped her career in any way. 15 Fan at the age of twenty-six began training as a nurse in Sydney. She became a sister, nursed in France in World War One and like A 1 retired in her fifties (all the family had small but useful incomes from the trust by this time.) She too ended her days in England. A 1 and Fan wanted to live with Wal in Sydney but since Wal had for a long time been sharing a house with Jane and her daughter, this was impossible. They recognised, moreover, that England had much to offer them, in particular a subculture of single women and widows, into which they fitted. They lived in boarding houses and private hotels, always in touch, seldom together; I suspect each preferred more cheerful company. It seems unlikely that Fan’s career gained significantly from her English schooling. 16

Frank studied medicine at King’s College, London, and wrestled with letters of advice from his father. In one letter Mr Bennett complained that Frank gave too little detail when he wrote, a little later he complained of too much. He criticised Frank for showing off, and emphasised how much money he spent on him and what a poor return he seemed to be getting for it. Above all he urged Frank to work hard and ‘to cultivate all the Australians you can’, two things which were not very compatible, as Frank pointed out. Frank failed several examinations and did not complete his degree until after his father’s death. Although Mr Bennett hoped he would return to Australia to practise, Frank, whose professional contacts and friends were all in England, never did this.

When about thirty, Frank was appointed as doctor to the Army and Navy Stores in London and stayed there till just before his death in 1927. He also had a private practice in ophthalmology which he gave up as it dwindled to nothing. He served in Paris with the Red Cross in World War One. His salary at the Stores after the war was £ISOO, a good one for the time, but his work does not sound like the sort of thing that anyone seriously interested in medicine would pursue for thirty years. At the age of forty-five, he married a woman not much younger, whose family had known the Bennetts in Sydney, a woman Frank had known for twenty odd years. The relationship between her and A 1 and Fan was poor. Not getting on with in-laws was a Bennett tradition, firmly exemplified by Frank’s parents. Frank carried this a stage further

by writing about his own wife as though she were an in-law. It was not a particularly happy marriage. Frank probably received a better medical education in London than he would have received in Sydney at that time, though whether he personally gained from it is more doubtful. His obituaries in medical journals emphasise what a good chap he was and how active in the British Medical Association. I doubt if he was a particularly good doctor and I doubt if his thirty years at the Stores, sole doctor on the staff, stimulated him. He missed his family and as he grew older he began to regret the life style which had been denied him. A few weeks before he died, when he must have known that the end was near, he wrote to Agnes, ‘I sometimes regret that one’s parents took one away from the land and its amenities for which one was so well suited and seemed to be inherent in ones own nature’. 17

The distancing style —‘one’s parents’ —was not the way he usually wrote. Was the severance from his family, forced upon him in his teens, something which he could not contemplate except in a remote way? Alf went into his father’s office and worked for the rest of his life in the Department of Roads and Bridges, steadily failing exams. There is very little about him in the letters. He died at the age of twentyfive. The meagre information about his death is compatible with something like pneumonia. His schooling in England can have had little effect on his later life. 18

Wal worked in the wool trade in a Sydney office. In his mother’s letters he appears as the most normal and mischievous of the boys, who is hardly recognisable in the man he became. A bed wetter at sixteen, presumably as a result of the family tensions, Wal was pushed by his father’s death into too many responsibilities. After Alfs death when Wal was not yet twenty-four, Wal was the only adult male in the family in Australia. He took on most of the work involved in the family trust and showed considerable financial flair. In time the family got useful small incomes from the trust and as some of them died, the rest became comfortably off. Wal became increasingly involved with the trust; his letters to Agnes sometimes contain nothing but financial information. He aged quickly. If I had to choose one word to describe Wal it would be ‘self-punishing’; although generous to others he was very hard on himself. He was Agnes Bennett’s favourite brother and was much loved by his half-sister Mary. 19 His English schooling can have made little difference to his career. The emotional maelstrom which followed his father’s remarriage and his responsibilities for others in the family, seem to me to have spoiled his life up to a point. Agnes was considered by her parents to be the brightest of the children. She was the only one to have an outstanding career, though it seems to have been her character rather than exceptional intellectual

gifts which earned her this. Her University marks in medicine suggest a very good 2/1 student. After taking a BSc honours degree in Sydney, she found that there was no work for a woman scientist though there was for men with a lesser qualification. Borrowing money from her family, she went to Edinburgh in 1895 and took a medical degree. She returned to Sydney, where she found it hard to establish a practice. In 1905, she had the chance to buy the practice of a woman doctor in Wellington and she worked in Upper Willis Street until she retired. For twenty-eight years she was also medical officer at St Helen’s Hospital, Wellington. In World War One she was head of a hospital in Serbia; this was financed by the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, an outcome of the women’s suffrage movement. She was proud of her connection with Cheltenham Ladies’ College and attended the celebrations there on the centenary of Miss Beale’s birth. But it is difficult to know what she may have gained from her schooling there and at Dulwich, both because she was a very bright child before she went to England and because she was barely nine when she left. 20

After going to boarding school in or near Sydney, Harry trained as an engineer in England, leaving Australia at the age of twenty-three. He built up a reasonably good business in Newcasde. His success cannot be attributed to his English schooling because he had none. I feel bound to point out, however, that Harry is no advertisement for Australian schools since he was the least literate of the seven. Frank claimed that Harry’s inability to write properly harmed his career. Like Frank, he married in England someone already linked by family friendship with the Bennetts. He was the only one of the seven to have children and was to prove an irritable father to his daughter and two sons, taking little pleasure in their company on the whole, an attitude very different from his own father’s. Al, Fan and Frank believed that Harry’s marriage was unhappy. I do not consider them to be unbiased witnesses but from what evidence I have seen it does not seem especially happy. 21

The plan to take the children to England was, I believe, misconceived. The schools were good but three or four years in England could not help all of them: the seven were inevitably at different ages and stages. The ones most likely to benefit were the three oldest, thirteen to fifteen when they arrived. But no careers were planned for A 1 and Fan and all they did for many years after returning was help with the family and visit friends. Their mother’s death was certainly the cause of their domestic load but I am not sure whether any training would have been planned for them if she had lived. Alf, Wal and Agnes were probably too young for their English schooling to have had any serious long-term effect. If the plan was not a success in career terms, in personal terms it was a disaster, leading as it did to Mrs Bennett’s death and Mr Bennett’s

remarriage. This brought great unhappiness to the children and I think to him, too. The children ended up scattered around the world, wishing they were all together, which they never were, even briefly, after 1881 . Their personal lives, overall, do not seem particularly happy. I believe that the seven Bennett children would have been at least as successful and probably happier if the venture to England had never taken place.

THE BENNETT FAMILY William Bennett (1824-1889) married Agnes Hays (1841-1881) ||^^^| Al( Alice) Fan Frank Alf Wal Agnes Harry b. 1863 b. 1864 b. 1865 b. 1868 b. 1869 b. 1872 b. 1876

REFERENCES This article is based almost entirely on the papers of Dr Agnes Bennett held in the Alexander Turnbull Library, MS Papers 1346. Items in this collection are referred to below by their folder numbers. 1 Cecil and Celia Manson, Doctor Agnes Bennett (London and New Zealand, 1960), p. 12. 2 Folder 388 includes newspaper items relating to his career. 3 Letters in folder 397 give details of Mrs Bennett’s family of origin. 4 Folders 373, 374, 375. 5 W. C. Bennett’s letters to his wife while she was overseas are in folder 376 for 1878, 377 for 1879, 378 for 1880, 379 for 1881. Her letters to him are in folder 394 for 1878 and 1879, folder 395 for 1880 and 1881. 6 Frank’s gruelling day is described in his mother’s letter of 24 March 1880. 7 E. H. McCormick, Alexander Turnbull: His Life, His Circle, His Collections (Wellington, 1974), p. 57. 8 Manson, p. 19. 9 Frank’s letter to his father of 21 June 1881, folder 416. 10 Folder 382. 11 Letters in folder 382 give information on the family after their return from Sydney. 12 Manson, p. 21. 13 Many letters over the years make this clear. Letters in folder 406 give Al’s view of the situation in the early years of the relationship. 14 Folders 146, 147, 204. 15 Folders 84, 85, 86, 106, 107. 16 Folders 87, 112, 113, 114. 17 Folders 416, 116, 117, 118, 119. 18 Folders 382, 412. 19 Folders 89, 90, 91, 98, 99, 101, 102. 20 A large number of the items in the Agnes Bennett Papers naturally relate to Dr Bennett. Manson gives a summary of her life. 21 Folders 140, 141, 117, 118. 119.