The “lodge” which Robert Haworth built at Kembla Grange. Photo: Wollongong City Library Collection.
You would never guess from the perfunctory records of the NSW Parliament’s member details that there was much worth knowing about a bloke named Robert Haworth (with a very variously spelt surname) who somehow managed to get elected and serve as the Member for Illawarra from 12 December 1860 until 10 November 1864.
But Robert Howarth’s election was actually quite surprising, given that just eight days before his electoral success he was meant to talk at a public meeting held near Rixson’s Pass.
But, puzzlingly, he refused to say anything. So a 10 to one majority of those in attendance voted “that, in the opinion of this meeting, Mr Robert Haworth is not a fit and proper person to represent Illawarra in the next parliament”.
The scant parliamentary records of this early Member for Illawarra at least get some of his personal details right: “Arrived in Australia c.1835. Son of Richard Haworth and Lizzie Birch. Married (one) Alice Whittaker c. 1822 and had issue, four daughters and four sons. Married (two) Thirza Tapp Webber on 7 October 1854 and had issue, two daughters and two sons. Church of England.”
One anonymous person (styling themselves in 1861 pseudonymously as “A Teazer”) suggested Howarth’s character was marked by “cunning, deceit and selfishness”.
But Andrew McGill of Albion Park thought Howarth, “an enterprising and energetic resident of the district – to him it was indebted for some of the industrial operations that were to be found around us”.
What the NSW parliamentary records do not reveal, however, is that while Robert Haworth did arrive in NSW in 1835, he did so as a transported convict given a sentence of seven years.
Convicted under the vague term of “larceny”, precise court details of Howarth’s crime do not survive and remarkably, no account of his case ever hit the English or Australian press.
After being assigned to the Carruth Brothers at Kembla Grange in 1837, by January 1840 Howarth had gained a much prized early Ticket of Leave and was pretty smartly on his way to fame and fortune.
He even was able to eventually purchase some of his former master’s 2000 acres (809 ha) years after the Carruth brothers went bankrupt.
Things were pretty grim back in England though, for Howarth’s wife, the former Alice Whittaker, was dead by 1837. This was followed by Howarth’s mother in 1840 and his father by late 1842.
Two of his youngest children were thus left in desperate straits as his father, prior to death in 1842, was “infirm and living in lodgings” and thus unable to maintain the youngest two of his surviving six grandchildren.
A portrait of Haworth in his older years. Photo: Supplied.
But in the Illawarra by the 1850s, Howarth was already in possession of extensive land holdings all across the Illawarra after also having built at Kembla Grange not just a house but what was described as a “lodge”.
Howarth also established a butchery at Kembla Grange and ran a tannery in Wollongong which seems to have prospered remarkably well. He also became a director of the Illawarra Steam Navigation Company and eventually built the large Queen’s Hotel in Wollongong’s Market Square as well as leasing his Kembla Grange farm lands.
It was even claimed Howarth was for a time the Illawarra’s largest single employer of labour. And, as well as being a donor to the Church of England, Howarth was elected among the first aldermen of the Wollongong Municipality – even though he received the lowest votes in the poll.
In the NSW Parliament, however, Howarth succeeded in helping extract very considerable funding for the improvements approved by the Wollongong Harbor Trust Act.
Howarth also became a “silent partner” in the Mount Pleasant Colliery and hence had a personal interest in getting its coal tramway connected to the improved Wollongong Harbour he had already helped achieve.
Howarth at least did eventually get some of his English-born children to NSW to enjoy his commercial success. But he lucked out with bringing a nephew, Jonathan Manks Howarth, to NSW. He set this man up as a Kembla Grange butcher and Howarth’s eldest daughter married him.
But this nephew took to drink, engaged in domestic violence and died in 1867.
Fortunately, Howarth’s daughter seems to have done better with a second marriage in 1878 to Thomas Collins, a Wollongong jeweller.
One of Howarth’s English children, Richard (born in the year of his father’s transportation to Australia) became his father’s clerk and reputedly, an accomplished bookkeeper.
It was said that Richard’s “early life was spent amongst Illawarra surroundings” and though “reared at the homestead at Kembla Grange, he came to Wollongong, riding in a carriage – his life was gentle. All that position and money could give was his”.
Not bad for a son previously left destitute because his father became a convict transported to Australia for larceny.
Only Robert Haworth’s 1875 Illawarra obituary provides the slightest hint of his former life: “Taking every drawback with which he had to contend in his early days in this district into consideration, the manner in which he improved his position and bettered his fortune reflected very great credit upon him”.
Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t?
