Where They Were Sent

The Army List of 1781 prints the junior engineers in a column, each name with the date of his seniority, carried down the page in ditto marks. Inside a block headed 17 January 1776 stands ROBERT D'ARCY, Practitioner Engineer and Second Lieutenant. It is the first paper that names him. The army's own book of 1820 gives the same day, and so does the roll of the Corps printed in 1898. He came in on the bottom rung of a slow corps, and no paper says where he came from.^doc

On 21 June 1779 he married Jean Ward at St Mary's, Portsea. She was a Scot. The South Leith register christened a Jean Ward on 19 July 1754, daughter of Joseph Ward and Martha Gairden, and the archive takes her for the bride: the parish and the year are the ones the family always gave, and the child she and Robert brought to the font at Portsea on 19 March 1780 was a boy called Joseph, her father's name. That entry, Joseph, son of Robert and Jean, is the first record of this family in England, and the only paper anywhere that names Robert as somebody's father. How a Leith girl came to marry in a Hampshire church, no paper says.^inf

Then the corps sent him away. In 1781 he was one of six engineers at the siege of Fort St Philip's on Minorca, where the Duc de Crillon had landed in August and the garrison was about three thousand. By the middle of the decade he was in Barbados: the parish of St Michael, Bridgetown, christened his son Constantine on 18 February 1786 and his daughter Jane on 17 March 1788, both to Robert and Jane, and the Corps' own station list puts him there. He was a first lieutenant from 1784 and a captain from 1793. It was, the archive says, a slow career.^doc

Of the sons, Joseph went into the Royal Artillery and later spent five years in Persia. George Pitt, who carries this line, went into the 39th Foot. Constantine followed his father into the engineers. A daughter, Margarett Maria Isabella, married at Chatham in 1806 with Joseph signing as witness, and three more, Jane, Catherine and Charlotte, were keeping house together at Brighton in 1841, and died there. That George Pitt was one of these sons is the archive's reasoning from a newspaper, set out in the next chapter.^inf

The family's tree gives the couple ten children in fourteen years. Among them are two girls called Anna Maria, the first dead at five months in 1791 and the second at seven in 1800, known from the tree alone; and a Richard, whom the archive can place only as a man of fifty-seven living in Joseph's house in 1841.^lore

By 1805 he was a lieutenant-colonel, and the Kentish Gazette called him «Col. D'Arcy, chief engineer of Chatham lines». It said so in reporting the death of his son. Constantine, a first lieutenant of the Royal Engineers at nineteen, was buried at Chatham on 9 May 1805 with military honours. The Ordnance notice that had made the father lieutenant-colonel had promoted the son in the same column.^doc

He served abroad again: in Portugal and on Minorca in 1798, by the Corps' roll, then as commanding engineer at Copenhagen in 1807 and with the expedition to Walcheren in 1809. At the siege of Flushing that August his superior, Colonel Fyers, was wounded, and ordered the senior engineer in the trenches to send him a written report every morning. The Corps' historian tells what followed, from Fyers's brigade-major. «Colonel D., an old man beyond sixty», refused; said it «was all nonsense»; denied that a man he had once been senior to could demand it; and was put under arrest. Then he thought better of it, apologised, «and ever after furnished his report». The historian's footnote names him. It is the only glimpse of his temper any paper gives.^doc

He rose to colonel in 1813 and to major-general. Jean died at Chatham in March 1823; the register gives her age as sixty-six, two years adrift of the baptism, and a Hampshire paper called her «the wife of Major-Gen. D'Arcy, of the Royal Engineers». He died at Chatham on 13 May 1827 and was buried at St Mary's on the 19th, entry 1571, aged seventy-six. «On Saturday Major-General D'Arcy … was interred at Chatham with military honours», the Kent Herald reported. Seventeen papers in three countries carried his death. Not one gave his first name, or named a single relative.^doc

That age on the burial register is where the family tree's birth year of 1751 comes from: arithmetic on a mourner's estimate, not a birth record. His own page in this archive says he was born by 1758, and probably earlier. What he was, the papers say in full. Who he was, they do not.^inf

On 31 March 1826 St Mary's, Chatham, christened a girl called Charlotte, eleven months old. Against the father the entry reads «George Pitt D'Arcy, Bt: Major 39th Foot», against the mother Maria, and for their abode, Chatham. Eight days later the surgeon of the convict ship England received aboard «a detachment of the 39th regt. of foot commanded by George Pitt D'Arcy, B. Major, consisting of 39 men (including 2 sergeants and 3 corporals), 6 women and 7 children». They christened the baby, and then they sailed.^doc

He was almost certainly Robert's son, though no paper names his father. In September 1805 a Wiltshire paper announced that «Captain George d'Arcy», son of «Lieut. Colonel D'Arcy», had married «Miss Ludlam, of Guernsey». Robert was by then a lieutenant-colonel of engineers. The notice gives a rank and not a name, and the archive calls it a very strong identification and not a proof.^inf

When he was born is not settled. The family's tree says 18 February 1783, at «Portsmouth, Hampshire, England or West Indies», and the «or» is the tree admitting it does not know. Every notice of his death says he was sixty-nine, which puts his birth about 1780. The army's own book has him an ensign of the 39th on 25 August 1794; if the tree is right, he was eleven.^lore

He made his life in that one regiment: lieutenant in 1795, captain in 1803, brevet major in November 1813. The Peninsular War roll has him with the 39th in 1808. His obituary lists his actions from Vitoria in June 1813 to Toulouse in April 1814, and at Orthes, on 27 February 1814, the command of the regiment fell to him when its lieutenant-colonel was wounded early in the action. He was given a gold medal for it. «Singular to relate», the obituary says, it was sent by mistake to the wounded colonel, and took four years to reach him.^doc

There were two wives. Miss Ludlam was, very probably, the mother of Frederick Robert, christened at Chatham on 2 July 1811 to George and Mary; he grew up to be a surveyor, and helped chart Port Phillip Bay. The second wife was Maria, known from the papers only by her first name: as the mother at Chatham in 1826, and again at Sydney in 1829.^inf

The family's tree calls her Maria White and marries them in County Wicklow about 1819. The newspapers put the major in Ireland with the 39th in 1820 and 1822, which is the right country at nearly the right time. The marriage itself has not been found.^lore to be confirmed

The journal of the England, kept by her surgeon George Thomson, follows the voyage almost day by day. A hundred and forty-eight convicts came aboard from the hulks at Woolwich, and Mrs D'Arcy and family were in the cabin. On 17 May the convicts broke into the major's luggage in the fore hold: a crate of dinner ware and a box of soup. Later there was a scare of mutiny, three knives traced to one prisoner, and «Major D'Arcy gave the necessary orders to the guard how to act in case of an alarm». On 16 August the surgeon noted that the major had recovered from his attack of the gout. On 18 September 1826 the ship came into Port Jackson after a hundred and thirty-five days, with no deaths.^doc

George Lindsay was born at Parramatta on 24 August 1829. He was christened at St James's, Sydney, on 5 November, «father George Pitt Darcy, mother Maria». It is the entry that joins the next chapter to this one.^doc

Of the next twenty years in the colony the archive holds nothing: no house, no post, no letter. Then, on Sunday morning, 22 July 1849, the major died at Parramatta, at the house of a Mr Walford. The notice ran in Sydney, Maitland and Hobart. A coroner's jury found «gout which had flown to the head, and caused apoplexy»: the complaint the ship's surgeon had noted twenty-three years before.^doc

The obituary called him «a brave and gallant soldier», and then its tone changed: «the canker of disappointment was at his heart's core, and his smile was too often only the shroud of buried hopes». He had «never injured anyone but himself». The archive reads that as a writer going carefully round something, most likely drink or debt or both, and says plainly that this is inference from tone and not a fact. Where at Parramatta he was buried is not established.^inf

He enlisted at Brisbane on 13 December 1915. On 18 March 1916 he married Ivy Miriam Sneyd at Albion Church. On 18 May he sailed from Sydney on the troopship Demosthenes, Sergeant 11335 of the 12th Australian Depot Unit of Supply, with his wife as his next of kin. Nine weeks separated the wedding from the ship, and he did not come home until July 1919.^doc

Lindesay Atkinson D'Arcy was born in Brisbane on 15 July 1892, the only son of the railway clerk, and went to the old Normal School. His obituary and his funeral notice spell him Lindsay. All his children knew of his war was a phrase in his obituary, that he «served with the Australian Forces in France during the Great War». The rank, the number, the unit and the ship were found by this archive.^doc

Ivy's younger brother Arthur Hartley Sneyd, a typist of twenty-one, had enlisted in September 1915. He gave up his sergeant's stripes to get into the line, joined the 9th Battalion in France on 29 July 1916, and was killed in action on 20 August, twenty-two days later. His report of death gives his burial place as «Not yet to hand», and it never came to hand. Another brother, Vivian Claude, came home with the Military Medal and Bar.^doc

Ivy brought other roads into the family. The tree has her born at Boulia on 31 October 1891, to Arthur William Hartley Sneyd and Martha Blum, a Rockhampton girl whose father, John Blum, was born in Germany.^lore

Her grandmother Miriam Wakefield was born in the parish of St Paul, Bristol, in April 1840, a mason's daughter. On 16 December 1854 the General Hewitt put into Brisbane with three hundred and ninety-four souls, and the Wakefields were eight of them: James, forty-eight, a mason, his wife Hannah, and six of their children. Miriam was entered among the single women as «Marion», fourteen, a domestic servant. Five years later she married William Hartley Sneyd, later of the Government Printing Office, whose father, Samuel Charles Sneyd, a Hanley grocer's son from the Staffordshire Potteries, had come out with the 4th (King's Own) in 1832 and ended as Governor of Brisbane Gaol. That these are Ivy's grandparents is the tree's; the papers stand behind each of them.^inf

The 1920s went badly. For about two and a half years he ran a grocery in Cavendish Road, South Brisbane, «with the assistance of his wife». A few months before the end he took a clerk's post with the Union Trustee Company and left Ivy to run the shop. On 25 July 1926 he could not go on, and on 1 October he was declared insolvent, with a deficiency of £1,381. When the trustee went to court the next September, against the bank and not against him, the paper called him «of Sandgate».^doc

He stayed with the Union Trustees, and in 1929, as the company's agent, he took over the affairs of a pastoral company and found money missing. The agent he replaced told him, «Don't say any more. I don't wish my wife to know anything about the business». When the promised cheque never came, he went to the C.I.D. Three years after his own insolvency he was the witness for the prosecution.^doc

His youngest son remembered him at home, and told it to his own children, who told it at his funeral. An old Queenslander at Clayfield. A keen gardener: no bicycle, which was too dangerous, and no football in the backyard, which was bad for the garden. A boy who fell out of the mango tree into his father's tub of liquid manure, and a father more upset about the manure. The same boy set to whack the mosquitoes off his father's bare back while he hosed in the late afternoon, which gave them «the chance to have some really good chats». Camping at the beach each Easter, card games, visitors, and an African Grey parrot that called «Come in» to anyone who knocked.^lore

He died suddenly on 10 November 1936, of Botany Street, Clayfield, aged forty-four, and was buried at Toowong. The obituary said he left a widow and five children. Within months Ivy had a repatriation pension file open in her own name. It has not been read, and its existence says nothing about what killed him.^doc

What followed is the family's memory. Only the eldest boy was working. Ivy had no trade of her own, and she took in boarders: up to thirteen people round the table at mealtimes and, her youngest said, never really a normal home life after that. She lived until 1979.^lore

Kenneth Lindsay D'Arcy was born at Sandgate on 17 August 1927 and died in Brisbane on 3 March 2010, aged eighty-two, and the record of his burial at the Centenary Memorial Gardens gives both days. Almost everything else this archive knows of him comes from the eulogy his three children gave at his funeral, which it prints in full. It is family memory, and it is marked as such. Where the papers can test it, they agree with it.^doc

No record the archive has read names his parents. That he was the youngest of the five children of Lindesay and Ivy comes from the tree and from the eulogy, and the obituary of 1936 agrees with the eulogy on the house at Clayfield, the Union Trustees, the sudden death and the five children.^inf

His father died when he was nine. Soon he and his brother Bill were going to the Savoy Picture Theatre at Clayfield on Friday nights with threepence from their mother, spending it on cigarettes and stealing the matches. He smoked from that age. At Ascot State School he threw his lunch into the incinerator on the way to the oval, for more time at football and cricket. He passed the Scholarship, went on to Brisbane State High, got three per cent in Junior Chemistry and failed Latin, and at fifteen started work at Union Trustees, where his father had worked.^lore

On his seventeenth birthday, in 1944, he had his medical for the navy, and from February 1945 he trained in Melbourne as a sick bay attendant. He spent a few months on Thursday Island and played a great deal of table tennis. Once, off duty, he fell asleep on a ship's deck and was so badly sunburnt that he was ill for days; he always wondered whether it had anything to do with the melanomas that came later. He was discharged early in 1947 and went back to Union Trustees.^lore

In 1948 the firm sent him to its Toowoomba branch, where Audrey Murdoch, known as Dell, nineteen, worked in the office. By her own account she was disappointed at first sight. They got to know each other at table tennis. When he was moved back to Brisbane he wrote to her most days, and on 5 April 1952 they were married, at Toowoomba by the tree's account. Her father's people were Murdochs out of Ayrshire, whose arrival in Queensland nobody has yet dated.^lore

They built the first of four houses at Stafford. He went to National Mutual, and in 1963 the company made him District Sales Manager for North Queensland, at Townsville, for what his children remembered as perhaps the best decade the family had. A stone thrown up by a lawn mower brought on a serious kidney illness late in 1971, and a cyclone tried to knock down the new house at Mundingburra. In 1972 the company sent him to Perth as State Sales Manager, and at the end of 1973 the family came back to Brisbane; in the floods that followed, its furniture was under water in storage at Rocklea. He was State Sales Manager in Queensland until he retired in 1982, at fifty-five, after thirty-two years with one company.^lore

Retirement was golf, his wife, and a long run of operations. He had the first of some twenty melanomas removed just before he retired, and came through an aneurysm repair in 1991. Told he had a few months, he lived more than four years, and said that one of the melanomas would get him in the end. One did. Dell outlived him; by the tree she died in 2022, and she lies in the same gardens.^lore

The eulogy is the only place in this archive where a man of this line is heard, at second hand, describing his own childhood; and the obituary of his father, found seventy-four years after it was printed, bears out every detail it can test.^inf