The biography marches on

Hi there. Welcome to 2023.

This year I am going to finish the biography of my great, great uncle Sir William George McBeath.  I didn’t work on it much in 2022 because I was consumed with a mystery series I was working on.  Great, great uncle William now has my undivided attention.

 Even though I had completed years of research, when I wrote the third book in the Cullen/bartlett family saga, “Time Tells All”, there were things I didn’t know. Fortunately contact with third cousins – via of all things, Ancestry – has given me access to more information. I knew my great, great grandfather, David Francis McBeth (McBeath) – William’s father – had drowned in the Maitai River in Nelson New Zealand, but I wasn’t aware of the tragic circumstances that saw young ten-year-old William witness his father’s death. One can only wonder about the resilience of a young man who loses his father this way, but then goes on to be an astute businessman and clever political influencer.

One aspect of young William’s life that has raised differences of opinion, is his education. In Who’s Who of Australia (1927) the entry records William as being educated at Nelson College in New Zealand. Research into the College reveals it was a secondary school, which accommodated boarders. William’s mother left New Zealand and returned to Melbourne soon after his father’s death. For William to have been education at Nelson College, he would have remained in New Zealand.  He is not listed on the passenger list with his mother and siblings, on their return to Melbourne. I have it from a very reliable source, that Who’s Who of Australia interviewed the person whose entry went into the book. So William must have told the editors where he was educated. I did contact Nelson College, but of course the records relating to the time he would have attended the school, were lost in a fire in 1904.

 The family story is that William sold newspapers on the family’s return to Melbourne, to help his mother financially. But that does not seem likely. David Francis McBeath had a five hundred pound life assurance policy which named Elizabeth as beneficiary.