Thomas Tobin and Alice (O’Dowd) Tobin

Thomas and Alice in Fremantle – (1898 – 1900)

With the loss of Maria and with two young children Winnie (5) and John (2), Thomas was in a bind. He couldn’t work and care for them at the same time. The family story down through the years relates:

While at work at the Fremantle Prison which included transporting prisoners between prisons, he paid a woman to take care of his children. However, she was spending the money at the pub while his children were left unsupervised. Fearing that the state would take them into care, a local priest warned him and said ‘Get yourself another wife.’ Not knowing any suitable women in Fremantle, he wrote to his friend Thomas O’Dowd in Melbourne and asked him to send over Alice, one of his daughters.

Thomas Tobin must have made a good impression on the O’Dowds as they sent their daughter Alice thousands of miles away from home, to marry him. Alice sailed on the S.S.Wollowra and arrived in Fremantle on March 4th, 1898. There is no record of a family member accompanying Alice on the S.S. Wollowra or travelling to Fremantle during Alice’s time there. Perhaps her father at least was there according to Phonse’s Recollections. But as he was completely wrong about the date of the wedding, Phonse probably thought that her father would accompany her. Without records, we’ll never know the truth.

Many years ago, my mother Vera Tobin told me that Alice had a boyfriend called Charlie. It is unknown how serious their relationship was at that time.

Just after Easter, on April 20th 1898, Thomas and Alice were married in the old St Patrick’s Church Fremantle. She was nearly 26. Thomas was 35. The Oblate Priests had arrived in Fremantle in 1894 and Thomas and Alice were married by Father Roger Hennessy OMI, who had TB. He wanted to leave Fremantle and found it a ‘place of penal servitude’. The old Church was considered a disgrace by priests and parishioners. Father Daniel O’Ryan collected over 800 pounds in his visits to the goldfields between 1897 and 1899. The foundation stone for the new Church (known as St Patrick’s Basilica since 1994) was laid on St Patrick’s Day 1898, a month before Thomas and Alice’s wedding. Sisters of the Apparition conducted the parish school in Thomas’s time in Fremantle. Some years ago, the property was purchased by Woolworths. A plaque in the footpath remembers the work of the Order.

Fremantle Friends

In The Undertakers’ Mother several characters were real people and friends of Thomas and Alice, in Fremantle.

On their Marriage Certificate, Patrick Carroll and Ellen Tully appear as witnesses.

On Mollie’s Birth Certificate, we find Rosanna Carroll as a witness and on the copy of her Baptism Certificate the names Francis O’Dowd and Agnes O’Dowd appear as god-parents. Agnes O’Dowd was a misprint as Thomas wrote in his diary that Agnes Tully was a god-parent.

The Marriage Certificate has Cantonment Road as Thomas’s residential address and Glyde Street as Alice’s residential address. Using Wise’s Postal Directory for research, I discovered a Mary Tully of ‘Peak Villa’ in Glyde Street. It was obviously a boarding house, so by taking poetic licence in The Undertakers’ Mother, her daughters Ellen and Agnes became Alice’s bridesmaids with Mary a trusted ally.

I decided also, to make Rosanna and Patrick Carroll, a married couple with a fictional daughter Grace, Winnie’s school friend.

However, friends could not replace her family, so Alice, Thomas and children returned to Melbourne in the early 1900s.