Farmers / Apprentices' Stories
Mischief at Croucher's Dairy: Hugh Lawson, Thomas Smith and James Quinlan
This story is a relatively long but entertaining one, thanks to the boys’ and farmer’s colourful first-hand accounts. It was presented at a meeting of the Fleurieu Peninsula Family History Group on 17 January 2009.
Based on the behaviour of boys he helped migrate to New Zealand and Ontario, Thomas Sedgwick advised the South Australian Government against placing more than one boy on a farm. Unfortunately this advice was largely ignored when dairy farmer John St Leonard (Len) Croucher was supplied with two farm apprentices.
Hugh Lawson, from the Kibble reformatory, and Thomas George Smith, from Sussex (nominated by the Kent Colonising Association), arrived on the SS Geelong in October 1913. Croucher's dairy at ‘Vaudan’, Hindmarsh Island, was their second placement.
The initial reports to the Immigration Department from Vaudan were positive. Croucher wrote that Lawson ‘is a real good lad, very willing and very well behaved and [I] should be very sorry if ever I have to lose him’ and that Smith ‘has been very satisfactory, besides being a good honest worker, he is a most well behaved boy and I hope that he will see fit to stay with me for some considerable time’. Lawson and Smith advised that they were ‘very highly pleased’ with their new home. However, Lawson added a cheeky postscript that ‘T Smith and myself find the fleas and flies very good friends to us. They keep us very lively’.
Mischief was brewing by March 1914, when the boys wrote to Immigration Officer Edgar Field asking for the population of London to settle a bet. Smith was also in hot water for writing a letter to the Postmaster General accusing his first employer of withholding mail and stealing his watch. It is likely that Smith’s accusation was precipitated by a delay in being informed of his mother’s passing in early 1914. The farmer engaged lawyers to seek a public apology from Smith.
Very soon there was an incident which led to Smith’s dismissal from Vaudan. The boys drank a bottle of whiskey and smashed a watch belonging to one of Croucher’s young sons. Smith was blamed, and Croucher deemed that ‘he is a boy that carries two faces and is as big a liar as Tom Pepper’ (which is an English saying – apparently Tom Pepper was kicked out of hell for being a bigger liar than Satan!)
Attempting to pre-empt his dismissal, Smith wrote to Field: ‘I should like a more lively job, with plenty of life among horses, or girls. As this dull monotone life will kill me. I am like Napoleon Bonaparte when he was in St Helena’. The boy was returned to Adelaide, where he was temporarily housed at the Domestic Helpers’ Home.