Alice Jeannette Forbes (1856-1941)

Image: Alice Jannette Forbes 1934, (aged 77)

Alice Jeannette Forbes (1856-1941) Foundation member of Historical Society of Victoria (2nd woman member)

Alice Jeannette Forbes was the older daughter of master draper John Griffiths and his wife Beathea Jeannette Dickenson who married at Camberwell, Surrey in 1854. At the time Griffiths was living in Shoreditch and his wife in The Old Kent Road.

The family lived in London’s East End for the next ten years. Alice was born at Paddington, London in 1856, her sister Agnes in 1863. Shortly after her sister’s birth the family set off for New South Wales and by 1867 Griffiths was working as a draper in Bathurst.

The motivation for their journey across the world is not known, but their emigration story did not have a happy outcome. In 1869, when Alice was thirteen, the family was torn apart by poverty and desperation. They were living in Paddington, Sydney and in May that year John Griffiths abandoned his family, leaving them to survive in whatever way they could. It ended in disaster. His wife was charged with stealing and pawning clothing and drapery from her husband’s employer, a draper named Carter and was sentenced to a month in gaol. Her desperate attempt to pay the family’s heavy debts and save herself and her daughters from starvation led not to their salvation, but to the disintegration of the family. Six year old Agnes was placed in the Randwick Asylum for Destitute Children until at age thirteen she was apprenticed to a woman who lived at North Shore. Alice, who was already thirteen, had been sent to Victoria, possibly to live with her mother’s brother William Dickenson and his family at St Kilda, although there is no evidence of this.

Nothing more is known of John Griffiths. Agnes married and eventually made her way to New Zealand where she died in 1938. The children’s mother is invisible until her death at Prahran in 1902 aged 70. She is buried in the Wesleyan section of St Kilda Cemetery with her brother William Dickenson and his wife Emily, although she is not mentioned on the headstone.

Alice Griffiths re-emerged into recorded history when she married Donald William Forbes at Echuca on 8 February 1881. She was 23 years old and was working for Forbes as his housekeeper. Her husband, the Echuca post and telegraph master for many years, was twenty years older and had been a widower for just over a year. She suddenly found herself step-mother to five children aged between five and twenty.

It was a busy life. Her early married years spent in Echuca were dominated by childbirth and child rearing and began with sadness, as her first two children, both sons and born in quick succession, died as infants. A daughter, Alice Marguerite St John (known in the family as Lassie) was born in 1886. A second daughter Beathea Frances Reay followed in 1890, named after Alice’s mother but known as Reay. The family was completed when a son, Ronald Bethune, was born in 1893.

At some time after her husband’s retirement, in the 1890s, the Forbes family moved to ‘Struan’ in Orrong Road, Toorak where Donald Forbes lived as a man of ‘independent means’. It was from there that Alice Forbes wrote to the newly established Historical Society of Victoria on 21 May 1909 offering the use of a diary written by her husband’s uncle Roderick Forbes who had arrived in Tasmania in 1821 and was in Victoria ‘for a time’ as the guest of his brother-in-law Mitchell Scobie of ‘Honey Suckle Station’ near Violet Town. (The RHSV holds material relating to Mitchell Scobie’s wife Flora (nee Forbes) in its collection.)

Alice Forbes, a foundation member of the Historical Society of Victoria and one of only three named women at its inaugural meeting, was the 47th member of the Society, but only the 2nd woman member. (Academic Jessie Webb was the first.)

She was a member for only two years and no reason was given for her resignation. It is likely that family affairs took over. Her daughter Lassie married in 1910 and moved to Ceylon then settled in England where she died in 1933. Alice’s husband was getting older (and died in 1915 aged 77). Her son Ronald sailed to England in 1916 and served in France as a Lieutenant in the (British) Rifle Brigade. Her daughter Reay married barrister Stanley Dobson in 1919. Alice, Ronald and Reay took up residence at Ribigill, a family run sheep property at Ballan after her husband’s death, although they all returned to the city in the 1920s.

Alice Forbes died at South Melbourne on 24 March 1941 aged 83. She was cremated at Springvale Botanic Cemetery and her ashes scattered.

Cheryl Griffin February 2021

Sources

RHSV archives – membership books, inward correspondence

Priestley, Susan, ‘The Society’s Century’, Victorian Historical Journal, vol 80, #2, Nov 2009. 161.

Argus, 9 February 1881, 2 December 1890, 20 November 1915, 3 February 1933, 12 March 1934

Australasian, 18 May 1918

Echuca and Moama Advertiser, 12 October 1915

London Gazette, 26 December 1826

Sydney Morning Herald, 13 May 1869

Ancestry family trees

For parents’ marriage: English marriage certificate, Camberwell, Surrey, for parents’ marriage

Baptismal register entry, Alice Jeannette Griffiths, 31 August 1856, St Mary’s, Paddington, London

Randwick Asylum for Destitute Children admissions register, 1869

St Kilda Cemetery records

Victorian birth, death, marriage indexes

Victorian electoral rolls

Probate for Donald William Forbes. PROV, VPRS28/P3. unit 579. file 141/633

Family information and photographs from great-great granddaughters Amanda Mason and Gaye Milner

For Roderick Forbes see Colonial Secretary’s Papers, NSW. NRS 937, 16 May 1822; Colonial Times, 21 November 1843; Colonial Times, Hobart, 5 June 1844; Launceston Examiner, 26 January 1867; Tasmanian death record, RGD35/1/36 no1 1867; Argus, 12 February 1867.

For Mitchell Forbes Scobie and his wife Flora (nee Forbes) see https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Scobie-119; 1847 Port Phillip Directory; 1856 electoral roll; ‘Flora Scobie 1848’, Rathbone, G.M., North-Eastern Historical Society, 1965, Wangaratta, Vic. RHSV vertical file, VF 028738.