1897-1901 – John Robinson Glendenning

John Robinson Glendenning, a 42 year old cigar merchant and tobacconist, settled into Stannington Avenue, Heaton, in 1897. Yet he was born on 18th February 1856 in Adelaide, the capital of the British colony of South Australia. Even more remarkably, he was probably conceived in Sunderland shortly after his parents’ marriage on 1st March 1855! How to explain such a remarkable journey?

For the answers, we have to turn to his parents. Father William Glendenning, born in Bishopwearmouth, Sunderland in 1829, was the eldest son of a Scotsman from Parton, Kirkcudbrightshire (Glendenning was a famous name among the Border Reiver clans in the Scottish West Marches). His mother was Ann Matilda Robinson, the 21 year old daughter of John Robinson of Hunstanworth, Durham.

Life in Sunderland in the 1850s cannot have been easy. There was no doubt employment in the traditional industries of coal mining, steel and shipping, but what if you were an adventurous young man looking for something more? We can only guess at the reasons, but something prompted the young William and his wife Ann to undertake the arduous months-long voyage to Australia.

What we know is that the British government was encouraging young couples to go out and settle the new Free Settlement of South Australia, different from the existing penal settlements of New South Wales and Victoria, with the promise of assisted passage and favourable land grants on arrival.

A long, hard and perilous voyage

Even so. why should a newly married young couple subject themselves to such a long journey? The likely answer was two-fold. One was the land being offered either free or at very low rates by the new colony in an attempt to attract settlers. Another reason may have been family knowledge – other Glendennings had already migrated to South Australia in the 1840s and 50s in search of their fortune.

In the 1850s and 1860s, Adelaide and the South Australia region were expanding rapidly. Yet they were still small, without yet a metropolis to compare with Sydney or Melbourne. Ships were departing from England at regular intervals carrying migrants for the growing colony. Although the passengers were free men and women, the ships carrying them had been transporting convicts to the penal settlements only a few years earlier.

Ships like the Sunderland-built sailing barque Castle Eden, which departed Southampton on 11th September 1862 and arrived at Port Adelaide, South Australia on the 26th December carrying some 200 migrants for the colony.

For the Glendennings, one attraction may have been gold, the possibility of striking it rich in newly opening up and gold-rich territory. Rumours of finding gold were beginning to spread in southern Australia, and such stories were already attracting fortune hunters and entrepreneurs from around the world. What a chance, to strike it lucky and change your family’s fortune at a stroke!

Whatever their motivation, William and Ann embarked on the ship Theodore at Liverpool on 2nd July 1855, bound for Port Adelaide. The trip would have been no picnic. Sailing to Australia meant a long, hard and perilous journey across the southern Atlantic and round Cape Horn, a graveyard for sailing ships that had been notorious for centuries.

Hopefully their voyage was smoother than on the Castle Eden, which did not have the best of reputations. On a voyage in 1850 carrying settlers to New Zealand, that ship’s passengers reported that, ‘Illness became prevalent on board with diarrhoea, typhus fever and whooping cough among the ailments. With dwindling medical supplies, perished food stores, steerage passengers experiencing great discomfort in cramped and wet conditions, and members of the crew disobeying orders, the Surgeon Superintendent Thomas Haylock and Captain Thornhill saw fit to touch at Cape Town on 12 December.’

At Cape Town, ‘the entire crew were arrested for mutinous behaviour. Once the crew were replaced, they were off at sea again with stores replenished and a number of new hands on deck, the Castle Eden was back on course. According to passenger reports, the second crew weren’t much better than the first, indulging heavily in the onboard rum.’

However, it seems young William and Ann Glendenning arrived safely at Port Adelaide on 3rd Nov 1855, according to the Adelaide Times, after a four month voyage. And the colony’s public records showed that Ann gave birth to their first son, John Robinson Glendenning, on 18th February 1856 in Norwood, Adelaide.

Start of the Australian goldrush

If the couple were hoping to strike it lucky, information would have been scarce. Early reports of finding gold on the outskirts of Adelaide were quashed by the authorities – they feared their plans for steady and orderly development in tune with the landscape could be overturned by a Calfornia-style gold-rush. They were right to fear so – as more and more news spread about finding small deposits of gold, the number of settlers built rapidly.

An early gold find in January 1846 by Captain Thomas Terrell at Castambul in the Adelaide Hills ended up being made into a brooch sent to Queen Victoria. Samples were displayed at the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851. That same year of 1851, significant new finds were made at Castlemaine and Bendigo in the neighbouring state of Victoria, then a separate colony.

News of such finds spread throughout Australia and overseas, eventually bringing about goldrush fever in the southern states. Triggered in 1851, the Victorian Goldrush was the only major goldrush that predominantly comprised immigrants from overseas. Over 350,000 prospectors arrived from the UK, Ireland, China, continental Europe and the United States. Within a decade, gold production from Victoria comprised some forty per cent of total world production.

Castlemaine Diggings, scene of the 1852-54 Mount Alexander goldrush, was the first major goldfield in Australia to attract a huge influx of voluntary immigrants. With gold sitting just under the surface, the shallowness allowed diggers to easily unearth gold nuggets. In seven months, over two million pounds weight of gold was unearthed from Mount Alexander and transported to nearby cities.

In the decade between 1850 and 1860, gold fever brought a significant increase in immigration to the colony of Victoria, with 290,000 people migrating from the British Isles alone. Australia’s total population increased nearly four-fold from 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million in 1871, and the country developed its first multicultural society during the period (source: Wikipedia).

Perhaps the news of these strikes influenced William and Ann. Because within two years they and their young son John Robinson had moved from South Australia to Victoria. On the 23rd September 1858 the Melbourne Public Lands Office records that the Receipt & Pay Office in Castlemaine granted Deeds of Title to 10a and 8a of land at Muckleford to William and John Glendenning. The boy was only two years old at the time, but perhaps William was thinking ahead (that or he deliberately deceived officials as to the true age of his son).

Where is Muckleford? It is right in the midst of the Mount Alexander gold fields, not far from Castlemaine, Victoria, and the centre of the goldrush fever then convulsing the country. The family stayed in the area for at least three years – for in 1861 another son was born, George Hamerton Glendenning, in Castlemaine.

Conditions in the gold fields harsh

What were conditions like in the gold fields of Mount Alexander? Harsh and primitive, if the few records available are any guide. The slopes and valleys of the mountain would have been strewn with tents and dilapidated wooden huts, sufficing only for somewhere to sleep, since the daylight hours would be consumed with grubbing, panning and sifting for that elusive gleam of gold.

There would have been a sense of competition certainly, especially if your plot was upstream or down from that of another prospector. And no doubt a certain element of crime, despite official attempts to award clearly deliniated patches of land to specific prospectors.

Hard manual labour and poor conditions could have brought sickness and disease – record keeping, such as it was, makes no mention of any attempt at latrines. Presumably they were constructed, if at all, on an ad-hoc basis by small groups of neighbouring prospectors.

I imagine that most prospectors’ wives and families stayed in the nearest towns and cities, such were the primitive conditions of prospecting. However it seems that some of the more hardy wives did share their husbands’ hardship on the gold fields, possibly running small local facilities such as soup kitchens for profit.

Did William strike gold? Unfortunately there are no records of gold finds in Victoria during the goldrush period, probably because by its very nature, coming across gold and striking it rich was a secretive business. So we don’t know if William Glendenning and his family struck it lucky or not, However it seems that for one reason or another, in 1862 the family left Australia and returned home to Sunderland.

Return to north-east England

The Victorian shipping records don’t correspond exactly, but on 27th May 1862 a Mr Glendinnen aged 41, Mrs Glendinnen aged 29, a John Glendinnen aged about 5 (probably our John Robinson), William Glendinnen aged 3 and a one year old infant (could be Joseph Alfred born Castlemaine 1859) all embarked in a 2nd class cabin on the ship Lincolnshire from Melbourne, Victoria, bound for London. It is almost certain that this is our family, and that they returned to the north-east, because a daughter, Dorothy, was born in Sunderland in 1863.

By 1871 the family had moved to Newcastle. Forty-two year old William Glendenning seems by now to have become a successful wine and spirits merchant, living with the rest of his family briefly at 12 Clayton Street (now Victory Amusements, next to Eldon Squ. Shopping centre), before they moved to Jesmond at 39 Jesmond Road. No. 39 must have been quite a sprawling household, since it included William and Ann, their six children including eldest son John Robinson and George Hamerton, two of Ann’s sisters Mary Ann and Rachel Robinson, and two servants.

Unfortunately Anne Glendenning passed away on the 15th April 1875 aged just 44, possibly the combined result of a hard life and the constant risk in childbirth. Unusually, she chose to be buried in the Robinson family burial plot at St James Churchyard, Hunstanworth, Durham rather than under the Glendenning name.

In 1881 William was still operating his established wine and spirits business at 9 Grainger Street, Newcastle (a premises beneath the Victorian County Hotel opposite the train station), while living at 39 Jesmond Road. Son George Hamerton worked as a Solicitors General Clerk while still living in the family home. Eldest son John Robinson had become a cigar and tobacco dealer with premises at 2 Newgate Street, while remaining at the family home in Jesmond.

Arrival in Heaton … for a while

Ten years later in 1891, John Robinson had left the parental home (he was 35) – he was registered as a commercial traveller and boarding at 13 Hood Street in the St Andrews ward of Newcastle. By 1894 he had opened new premises for his cigar and tobacco business at 3 Newgate Street (Gouldburn’s Yard), and 1897 he settled into Stannington Avenue.

John Robinson Glendenning remained in Stannington Avenue for the next four years, while maintaining his tobacconist premises at 3 Newgate Street. It seems that he was still a single man at this point – the registers show no other occupants. On 2nd July 1892 he was recorded as organising voting for the Conservative candidate in Newcastle’s local elections, one Chas. Frederic Hansul.

Interestingly, in 2026 the commercial premises at no. 3 Newgate Street seems to have vanished off the face of the earth! No. 1 is a solicitor’s office, although it does have what could be an ancient carriageway entrance. Next door at nos. 5-7 is the Rose & Crown pub, popular with football supporters.

By 1901 John Robinson had left Heaton and moved on, this time to 23 Queen’s Terrace, Jesmond, a home he shared with his housekeeper, Tuille Isabelle Wood (from Bothal, Cumberland). In 1902 he was on the move again, this time to Wingrove Avenue in Arthurs Hill, presumably to be nearer to his Newgate Street premises.

Meanwhile his brother, George Hamerton Glendenning, appears by 1901 to have taken over their father’s wine business. He is listed as a wine merchant living as head of his own family at 66 Gullins Rd, Helens Rd (?), Jesmond, with his wife Alice Glendenning and children Helen, Garth Hamerton and three servants.

Father William Glendenning, who had begun the whole Australian adventure, passed away aged 74 in Newcastle on the 19th November 1903. He was buried at Newham, near Bamborough, 15 miles from his father John’s censusplace of Wooler.

So do we know if William and his family ever struck lucky in the Australian goldrush of the 1950s-1960s? The fact remains that on his return to the north-east he started up what was by all accounts a successful wine and spirits business, and passed it on to his family when he died in 1903. In addition, in his will he left to sons William George Glendenning and George Hamerton Glendenning (but not to John Robinson or any other children!) the sum of £17,509 7s 6d, equivalent to almost £2 million today. I think it likely that a certain quantity of gold or its equivalent in currency made it back to Newcastle in 1862!

(But see Postscript 2 – an alternative route to family fortune).

Lives of the inheritors

In 1903 John Robinson Glendenning was still operating his tobacconist’s premises at 3 Newgate Street even though he had moved home again, this time to 23 Queens Terrace, Jesmond. However in 1904 the name on the premises changed, to Finlay & Son, tobacconists, who continued the business through 1905 and 1906.

His brother George Hamerton’s wine business had in 1905-1906 become Wm Glendenning & Sons, 26 Blackett St, with stores at 33 St Mary’s Place (now underneath the Civic Centre). Ward’s directories show the wine merchant’s business stayed throughout 1907 and 1908.

By 1911 John Robinson Glendenning was still listed as a tobacconist, but with no premises shown. He had also moved home, to 66 Shortridge Terrace in Jesmond. With him was Lilliane Isabelle Glendenning (his one-time housekeeper, now wife), eight year old William, and six year old Dorothy.

John passed away at Newcastle in June 1915 aged 59. And life for his widow and family afterwards may not have been easy; in 1921 Lillian Isabel Glendenning was registered as a boarder living at 218 Warwick Road, Carlisle, together with their daughter Dorothy aged 15.

George Hamerton Glendenning was still running the wine business in 1911, though he had moved his family to 13 Eslington Terrace, Jesmond. By 1921 he had relocated to Warkworth House, Warkworth, while continuing to operate the business at 33 St Mary’s Place, Newcastle. He died on the 28th November 1930 and was buried at Warkworth Cemetery. His wife Alice joined him in 1947 and is also buried there.

A notable descendant of George Hamerton and Alice was one of their granddaughters, Alice McMullen, who was born in Newcastle and became a Code and Cipher Officer at RAF Fighter Command HQ, in Bentley Priory, Harrow. She was awarded an MBE in 1985.

What kind of a man was John Robinson Glendenning? He does seem to have lived a fairly rackety kind of life, one which was dominated by his father William until his death in 1903. Perhaps family history, the name of a well-known Border Reiver clan, had something to do with it. In any case novelty, or change, was part of it. Imagine a childhood spent moving from one Australian colony to another in the search for gold, or the months spent at sea on the long voyage back to the UK. Depending on his temperament, it could have been wonderful. Less so if he was more timorous in character.

I wonder about the fact that he was not included as beneficiary in his father’s will of 1903. The tobacconist’s business appears to have folded at about the same time as his father’s death. I have also been unable to confirm his marriage to Liliane (apart from what is noted in the Census registers) or his place of burial. And the fact that his widow Liliane was boarding far from Newcastle after his death suggests that his family was not so well provided for. In the end of course we will never know – the past, as L P Hartley once wrote, is a foreign country.
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Postscript 1 – Goldrush had less happy outcome for Australia’s indigenous peoples

For migrants to Australia in the 1850s and 1860s, the goldrush represented an economic boom time and a fantastic opportunity. Certainly the period transformed the lives of many incomers, as did it the colonies themselves. Nevertheless, we now know that the story was not such a happy one for Australia’s indigenous communities.

The Australian colonies, both convict-based and free settlements, were responsible for large-scale displacement of Australia’s indigenous inhabitants, a fact that was ignored for many years for reasons of both inconvenience and embarrassment.

The colonies gradually became self-governing states and attitudes to the original inhabitants improved as governments became more established. But there can be no doubt that large-scale settlement of land would have caused conflict between settlers and the existing peoples accustomed to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

The boom years of the Australian goldrush would have made matters worse, there being a huge difference between pastoralist settlement (i.e. farming) and mineral exploitation, which meant surface grubbing and sifting along stream beds for gold, destroying large areas of land in the process. Unsurprisingly, the indigenous reaction to destruction of their environment became violent, which drew an equally violent response.

Britain disposed of some 160,000 criminals to Australia’s convict colonies, and a further 350,000 free settlers arrived from all over the world during the goldrush period alone. As a consequence perhaps one million indigenous people were dispossessed in a variety of violent and not-so-violent ways. A legacy that means Australia’s colonial history remains a live political topic today.

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Postscript 2 – an alternative route to family fortune

It seems that in all likelihood William and his family did strike it lucky in the Australian goldrush, and made enough money to be able to finance a successful wine and spirit business on their return home to the north-east of England. But there is another possibility.

The alternative history is that they were not successful in their attempts to find gold. Many prospectors did fail, presumably from not being lucky enough to be on a patch of land with gold deposits. It which case perhaps their prospecting efforts did not pay, or didn’t pay sufficiently well to make it worthwhile continuing. The cost of a gold prospecting licence in Victoria in 1850 was one pound per month, whether you struck lucky or not.

Yet young William and Ann first settled in Adelaide, at a time when the British colony of South Australia was expanding fast. And between the 1840s and 1860s groups of German Lutheran settlers arrived, attempting to escape from religious persecution in Prussia. They intended to try and build new wineries in the colony, and had brought grapevine cuttings from Europe with them.

Those settlers found that the climate in the Barossa valley, just 37 miles north of Adelaide, was well suited to the wine grape, in particular the Shiraz or Syrah grape variety. Barossa’s dry, hot climate helped ripen the grapes fully, producing dense and more flavourful wines.

The Barossa valley is now one of the leading suppliers of Shiraz wines in the world, with prices to match. Some of the oldest Shiraz vines in the world, planted in 1847 in Tanunda, Barossa valley, remain in commercial production today. Is it possible that William made some useful contacts among those early settlers during his time in Adelaide?

Such an outcome would help explain his setting up as a wine merchant on returning to Newcastle. As Australian wines slowly became better known on European tables during the 20th century, his contacts and experience would have made him well-placed to take advantage of any developing enthusiasm for ‘new world’ wines.

Perhaps it was those contacts that enabled him to establish a successful Tyneside wine business, and to leave a generous bequest to two of his sons, enabling them to continue the business after he passed on.

© Philip Hunt 2026.

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