This article appeared in the Friends of Wolverhampton Archives newsletter issued in September 2017.

What events led to elderly vicar’s suicide?

In the first of a two-part series written by the late Chris Upton retells the tragic tale of a vicar’s death and the mystery behind it.

                                      The picturesque church at Bushberry [sic]

A distressing report appeared in the Wolverhampton newspaper in July 1839. It concerned Reverend John Clare, the elderly vicar of Bushbury, a parish a little to the north of the town.

Although officially still the incumbent at Bushbury, Clare had recently gone into semi-retirement, moving out of the old Bushbury vicarage at the top of Sandy Lane and into the Wolverhampton Deanery in Wulfrun Street.  Now in his seventies, Rev Clare felt the need to be closer to his children, one of whom happened to be the vicar of St George’s church in the town. By 1839 John Clare had a long and largely successful career behind him, an MA from Oxford, 39 years’ service at Bushbury, a curacy at Wednesfield, and 40 years as a magistrate before the Stafford Sessions, half of those as chief magistrate.    What happened to him next, then, was all the more shocking.

On July 11, 1839, Rev Clare was found hanged in the kitchen of the Deanery. The subsequent inquest had no doubt that the cause of death was suicide. No doubt there were some in the town who shook their heads at such an infamous act, particularly on the part of a man of the cloth. Others would have known exactly why the old vicar had resorted to such desperate measures.

John Clare was laid to rest in the churchyard at Bushbury a few days later. His former home in Sandy Lane – built for Clare in 1805 with money from Queen Anne’s Bounty – was pulled down in the 1960s. The Wolverhampton Deanery, where he ended his life, was demolished before that, to make way for a Technical College, now part of the University.

All physical traces, it would seem, of Rev John Clare, and the reasons behind his tragic death, have been erased.

Time, then, to bring the tale back to life.

John Clare and his wife, Mary, had eight children in all at Bushbury, all dutifully noted in the parish baptism register over a period of thirteen years. We will need to concentrate on the fourth of these. Frederick Clare was baptised in the well-used font on April 8, 1804. 

There was something of the Brontes about this family. A stern, highly moral, paterfamilias, three daughters who never married and remained close to home, and a son who followed his father into the church.

Fred, however, was the exception to the rule. Once he was old enough, Fred Clare chose a very different way of life, running away to sea, and enlisting in the East India Company. The vicarage at Bushbury, and the family who occupied it, would be seeing him no more. The call of the sea was remarkably strong in the land-locked West Midlands.

                                                      The port at Hobart town

By 1833, when Fred wrote home, he was in the port of Madras, having just boarded a 300-ton barque called the Charles Eaton as second mate. The ship was on its maiden voyage, and now bound for Britain. Barques like the Charles Eaton did a variety of jobbing work, carrying passengers and cargoes across the high seas, picking up and setting down as and when necessary. The return to London would be a brief one; once it had enough paying fares it would be off again, wheeling and dealing its way across the British colonies.

By the time it was ready to set sail once more – in December 1833 – Fred Clare had been promoted to chief mate, second in command to the captain. The Eaton was now heading for Cape Town and then Australia. There was a clutch of wealthy passengers – including Captain William D’Oyley of the Bengal Artillery and his family – and an additional 13 steerage class, but hardly enough for a lucrative voyage. But, as luck would have it, just in time there arrived 40 boys and girls from the Children’s Friend Society, a recently founded charity, which took London’s waifs and strays out of “juvenile delinquency” and gave them new lives overseas. Now the Charles Eaton could depart.

It took just under three months for the vessel to reach Cape Town, where the London children were handed over to their new owners. Having taken on supplies, the Eaton then set sail for Hobart and then Sydney. Here again there was a brief stop, a change of personnel and cargo, and the barque was off once more, this time along the eastern seaboard of Australia and out into the South China Seas, en route for Canton.

There was no part of the sea that was not hazardous to wooden barques, but the north of Australia held more dangers than most. You can guess, I imagine, what happened next. In August 1834, the Charles Eaton ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef, close to the entrance of Torres Strait. After some days waiting in vain for rescue, Captain More reluctantly ordered the passengers and crew out of the frying pan and into two hastily assembled life rafts. And so the two parties set off into the great unknown. Five of the crew managed to reach land and reported the wreck. Of the fate of the rest, and of all the passengers, they had no word.

It would be two long years before, to general amazement, two boys were found on the Melanesian Murray Island, off the coast of Queensland. One was a cabin boy from the Charles Eaton; the other was the son of Captain D’Oyley. The tale they had to tell filled the newspapers and the bookshelves for years. But for that, you will have to wait till the next edition.

The second part of the article originally appeared in the November 2017 newsletter of The Friends of Wolverhampton Archives - the late Chris Upton looks at what the future held for the shipwrecked son of a Wolverhampton vicar

Gruesome fate of shipwreck survivors

                      The Survivors of the shipwrecked barque Charles Eaton in 1834

Before I told you a tale of a shipwreck. In August 1834 the East India Company barque, the Charles Eaton, ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef, close to the entrance to the Torres Strait. On board were the usual mixture of upper and steerage class passengers and crew, including (as first mate) Fred Clare, the son of the vicar of Bushbury, today part of Wolverhampton.

Five of the crew made a swift exit, and later made it to the safety of Timor, where they reported the accident. The remaining crew of the Eaton hastily assembled two makeshift rafts to take them and the passengers to safety, but the boats soon became separated. For two years nothing was known of the fate of the rest, numbering about 27 people, until two young lads turned up on Murray Island. One was a deck hand called John Ireland; the other was William D’Oyly, the son of a captain in the Bengal Artillery. So long had the boys been lost that they had almost forgotten how to speak English.

The boys had been captured by natives, and then sold for a bunch of bananas, after which they had the good fortune to fall into the hands of a kindly Murray Islander, who looked after them until a rescue mission arrived.

William and John’s adventures became the subject of a popular children’s book, published in the United States in 1845, and the earliest relating to Australia.  It ran to four editions. However, the tale they had to relate of the rest of the party was decidedly not Swallows and Amazons.  It was far from suitable stuff for a bedtime story.

For some days after the wreck, said John Ireland, the two rafts drifted aimlessly in the Coral Sea between the coast of Queensland and Borneo, one under the command of Captain Moore, the other under Fred Clare.  Eventually, with supplies of food and water almost exhausted, they were picked up by passing Meriam islanders, and conveyed to Boydong Island.  They seemed welcoming enough, commented Ireland.

Today this is popular Australian cruising territory, but in the early 19th century was a decidedly more hostile environment.  Although the two lads from the Eaton only saw what happened to Fred Clare’s boat, the events surrounding the other raft must have been much the same.

The crew and passengers, including the D’Oyly family and their Indian nurse, were taken by the natives into a nearby village, and here – there’s no easy way of saying this – they were clubbed to death.  Fred Clare himself was reported to have been the last to die, wrestling with his captors and running into the sea to escape.  But Fred too was caught and, along with his companions, beheaded.

Headhunting was not uncommon on these remote and warlike islands, and, as the straits became increasingly busy with European shipping by the early 19th century, so the risks increased.  The Europeans from the Eaton were simply convenient victims for the trophy cabinet.

Quite why William and John were spared is uncertain; perhaps they were seen to have more commercial value alive. But they survived to tell the tale, when a British ship found them two years later.

After the safe recovery of Ireland and D’Oyly, the rescue party went looking for any remains of their companions.  On nearby Aureed Island they discovered a hut in which stood a large, mask-like shield, some five feet in height, decorated in tortoise-shell, pearl and broken arrows. Tied to the perimeter were 45 skulls, 17 of which were identified by the ship’s surgeon as European.  Mrs D’Oyly’s head was recognized from her long fair hair.

We can only imagine the desperation of the castaways’ relatives back in England, anxiety only increased by wild rumours as to their fate.

                                                  The Deanery, Wolverhampton

In semi-retirement at the Deanery in Wolverhampton, Rev. John Clare heard the whispers with growing despair.  His son, they said, had fallen into the hands of cannibals; he should resign himself, they added.

There is, I think, no evidence that the unfortunate survivors of the wreck were, in fact, cannibalized (mercifully, given the name of their ship), though their end was grim enough.

“My son was on board the Charles Eaton,” wrote John Clare to a fellow sufferer in 1836, “which, I am informed by the newspapers, has met with a disastrous fate; but the nature of that fate I cannot ascertain.  In this dreadful state of hope and fear have I and my family been kept, for alas I cannot flatter myself that any rational gleam of hope can be indulged.  If they are still alive, the state of slavery and misery in which they are left, is too appalling for the imagination to reflect upon”.

When rumour turned to reliable report – now more than four years since the wreck – John Clare could bear it no more.  On July 11, 1839, he hanged himself in the kitchen of the Deanery.

The 17 skulls were buried in November 1836 in a mass grave at Bunnerong Cemetery in Sydney; the mask itself was presented to a museum.

But, in the long run, it is usually the Europeans who win.  Given added justification by such stories of inhumanity, a campaign of intermittent genocide was launched upon the Aborigines of the Torres Strait. The islands were claimed by Queensland and largely cleared of their native population.  And so the sea lanes were cleared for the European cargo ships.

And thus the young man from Bushbury, who ran away to sea, found a last resting place many thousands of miles from his native land.