Alexander & Anna Maria Cook

The south end of the Isle of Arran is a country of small farms running down to a rocky shore, with the Sliddery Water cutting through it to the sea and, across the Firth, the long low line of the Ayrshire coast. This is Kilmory parish, and it is where Alexander Currie Cook was born, in about 1810 — at ‘Laigh Kilmory’, according to the family’s own record — the son of John Cook and Mary Currie.¹ When John Cook died in 1837 the Sydney papers described him simply as ‘from the Isle of Arran’.⁶ His daughter Mary had been born at Kilmory in 1814, so the family was still in the parish then.¹

The Cooks were tenant farmers here, on the Duke of Hamilton’s estate, and the family tradition is that their farm was Glenree, at the head of the Sliddery Water a few miles inland from Sliddery. The present farmhouse still stands there, with the ruins of an older building beside it; no document has yet been found that puts John Cook’s family at Glenree, but the Cooks were certainly thick on the ground in this corner of the island. In the churchyard at Kilmory there are Cooks of Sliddery, High Claynod, Auchareoch, Torrylin and Shannochie, and a William Cook who kept the store at Kildonan.²

There were Curries too. Donald Currie, ‘late tenant in Kildonan’, died in 1831 aged seventy-six; two of his sons died at sea and one in Jamaica. Captain Alexander Currie ‘of the merchant service’ died in 1838 aged fifty-five. And there was a Captain Finlay Cook ‘of the merchant service’, born about 1779, about the same age as Alexander’s father.² Alexander’s mother was a Currie, he carried Currie as his middle name, and his brother was called Finlay: the names on these stones are very much his family’s names. Exactly how they connect has still to be proved from the Kilmory parish registers.

A bride, a ship and a whole family

By 1837 Alexander was a surgeon — trained, it seems, in Glasgow, since his family later remembered him as ‘formerly of Glasgow’.¹²³ On 26 August that year, at Ardrossan on the Ayrshire coast, he married Jane Campbell.³ She was very young — a native of the neighbouring town of Saltcoats — and they had three weeks together on land.⁶

That autumn the Rev. Dr John Dunmore Lang was filling bounty ships with Scottish emigrants for New South Wales, and one of them was the Minerva, 380 tons, master Thomas Furlong, lying at Greenock under the superintendence of Lang’s brother-in-law, Captain George MacAusland.⁴ Alexander signed on as her surgeon. With him went not only his wife but his whole family: his father John, his mother Mary, his sisters Mary and Margaret, and his brother Finlay. Among the other passengers were Highland and Lowland farming families from Kintyre, Islay, Skye, Kilmarnock and Saltcoats, a handful from Ulster, and a party of German Lutheran missionaries bound for Moreton Bay.⁴⁵

The Minerva weighed anchor off Gourock at two in the morning of 13 September 1837. One passenger, the emigrant William Henderson, kept a day-by-day log of the voyage, and it is through his eyes that the Cook family’s journey can be followed.⁵

‘Our whole ship appears like an infirmary’

For the first ten weeks the doctor’s main worry was a Mrs McKinnon of Kilmarnock, struck down with inflammation within a week of sailing; on 22 September Henderson noted that there was ‘little hope of her recovery — Dr Cook had none’, and she died a week later. Otherwise the passengers were mostly well. They danced on deck, held a christening and a wedding, sighted Madeira, caught flying fish and albatrosses, and in the heat of the tropics found the air between decks ‘very foul’. The food, Henderson wrote later, was the worst of it: sandy sugar, decayed meal and flour, the poorest tea, and ship’s biscuit ‘blue moulded … black in the heart’.⁵⁷

In late November, far south in the Indian Ocean, fever and colds began among the steerage passengers — ‘among whom was the doctor’s sister’. On 6 December two men died of typhus and were buried at sea the same evening. Then the fever reached the Cooks. ‘The Dr’s father died at 4 P.M.; he was buried instantly — stormy day’, Henderson wrote on 19 December. The next day: ‘at 1 o’clock P.M. the Dr’s mother died, and was thrown overboard at 2. — Dr’s sister taken to the hospital.’⁵

On 28 December the doctor himself fell sick. Two of the German missionaries took over the care of the patients. Mary Cook, who had seemed to be recovering, grew worse, and on New Year’s morning 1838 — ‘a bad omen … at the dawn of New-year’s morning’ — she died. She was twenty-three.⁵¹

A week later, with a dead passenger’s sea-chest found broken open and his watches, money and gold pins gone, Henderson recorded that ‘the Dr’s brother was one of the thieves’, and on 8 January ‘irons were put on the Dr’s brother’. The log never names him, but Finlay was the brother on board.⁵ The colony’s quarantine surgeon later admitted in print that two of the Minerva’s emigrants had been ‘found stealing during the passage’.⁹

On 11 January ‘Dr C. and wife’ were taken into the ship’s hospital. They sighted Van Diemen’s Land the next day. On 17 January ‘Mrs Dr C. … expired at nine A.M.’ Jane had been married to him for less than five months.⁵⁶

Under the yellow flag

The Minerva raised the Sydney Heads light on the night of 22 January 1838. Next morning the pilot came alongside and, learning there was fever on board, refused to come aboard; he ordered the yellow quarantine flag hoisted and led the ship into Spring Cove, inside North Head. Fourteen people had died at sea. Twenty more were ill, ten seriously — ‘and among the latter, we regret to enumerate Dr. Cook, the surgeon of the vessel’.⁴⁷ The ship’s surgeon was too sick to treat anyone, and a doctor had to be sent down from Sydney that night.⁵

Everyone was put ashore at the Quarantine Station and split into three camps — the sick, those exposed to contagion, and the cabin passengers — with no communication between them. It did not stop the fever. Over the next six weeks fourteen more died at Spring Cove, many of them people who had come ashore apparently healthy. The emigrants complained loudly of the doctors in charge, of the sick mixing with the well, and of the rations; the Board of Health came to inspect.⁷ Alexander and Finlay, both dangerously ill, slowly recovered.⁷

The healthy emigrants were released on 6 March and landed at the Dockyard with nowhere to go — the Government refused them even the empty Immigrants’ Barracks. The convalescents stayed on under the Colonial Assistant Surgeon, James Stuart. On 5 March they wrote him a letter of thanks ‘for your perseverance and kind attention to us while labouring under the fever’; among those who signed it were ‘A. C. Cook, Surgeon’, ‘Finlay Cook’ and ‘Margaret Cook’.⁸ The last of them were brought up to Sydney on Saturday 7 April 1838, ten weeks after the ship had arrived.⁸⁵

Surgeon and druggist

Alexander was twenty-eight, widowed, and had lost his parents and a sister in a single month. Within a year he had put up his plate. In February 1839 he announced in the Sydney papers that ‘Mr. Alexander C. Cook, Surgeon and Accoucheur’ had begun practice ‘in the various branches of his profession’ at the shop of Mr J. Foss, chemist, in George Street, Windsor.¹⁰ An accoucheur attended childbirths.

By June he was back in Sydney, at George Street, and caught up in a public quarrel among the town’s doctors. A prisoner named Richard Roberts had died in Sydney Gaol after being bled from the temporal artery by the surgeon-druggist John Neilson, and the coroner’s jury blamed the treatment. Alexander had been called to Roberts twice and had advised the bleeding himself. He swore an affidavit in Neilson’s support — ‘I consider the treatment followed in this case was highly proper, judicious, and that of a skilful surgeon’ — and wrote to the papers that he felt himself ‘equally implicated … in so far as the verdict goes’.¹¹

A month later Neilson took premises on Brickfield Hill, ‘about four doors from Liverpool Street’, and ‘entered into Partnership with Mr. Alexander Currie Cook, Surgeon’, to carry on a wholesale and retail chemical and drug business.¹² Within weeks other doctors were using ‘Neilson and Cook’s, Brickfield Hill’ as a consulting room. On 20 September 1839 Alexander bought Neilson out, and ‘the Brickfield Hill Medical Repository’ became his alone.¹³

Anna Maria Rainy

Six days after he took over the shop, Alexander married again. His bride was Anna Maria Rainy, twenty-two, the second daughter of Mr George Rainy of George Street. They were married by special licence by the Rev. John McGarvie, minister of St Andrew’s Scots Church in Kent Street — the second Presbyterian congregation in Sydney, opened in 1835; in the register Alexander gave himself as ‘Alexander Currie Cook of Sydney, Widower, Surgeon’. The witnesses were William Hutchinson, Margaret Cook — his surviving sister — and four of the Rainys.¹⁴

Anna Maria had been born in London on 28 June 1817, in Swallow Street off Regent Street, Westminster, the daughter of George Rainy, a smith, and his wife Anne; she and three sisters, Sarah, Emily and Anne, were baptised together at St George’s, Hanover Square, in November 1821. The family emigrated in the early 1830s, and by 1842 George Rainy had been clerk of Sydney’s hay, corn and cattle market for more than seven years.²²

A doctor in a raw town

In November 1839 Alexander was the doctor sent for when a Mrs Johnstone, injured in a fall, went into premature labour and her own surgeon, Gillespie, turned out to be drunk. ‘Mr. Surgeon Cook, of Brickfield Hill … immediately attended’, the Sydney Gazette reported, and found Gillespie ‘using language seldom heard beyond the atmosphere of the Rocks’; within a quarter of an hour of Alexander’s arrival Mrs Johnstone was dead. The case caused ‘a great sensation at Sydney’ and was reported as far away as Hobart.¹⁵

In April 1840 the new Medical Board, set up to decide who was qualified to give medical evidence at inquests, published its list of practitioners whose testimonials it had accepted: among them ‘Cook Alexander, Sydney’.¹⁶ The Board added ‘M.D.’ to the names of men who held that degree; it did not add it to his.

In January 1841 Alexander gave up the shop. A notice in nine Sydney papers thanked ‘his numerous friends and customers’ and announced that ‘he has disposed of his establishment to his brother Mr. Finlay Cook’, and that he would ‘henceforth confine himself entirely to the practice of his profession in all its branches’. Beside it ran Finlay’s own notice: he had ‘purchased the whole of his Brother’s Establishment’.¹⁷ It is the only record that calls them brothers in so many words.

Sued, nonsuited and held for debt

Alexander and Anna Maria’s first child, John Alexander, was born in 1841. The citizen roll of 1842 lists Alexander as the occupier of a house in Parramatta Street, in Phillip Ward — the road that is now the city end of Broadway.¹⁸ The colony was sliding into the worst depression of its short history, and in 1843 the family fell with it.

In August 1843 their landlord, George Segerson, turned Alexander ‘and his goods out of a house he had taken from him’. Alexander went to the solicitors Carr, Rogers and Owen, sued Segerson in the Supreme Court for trespass and briefed two barristers. When the case came on, on 8 November 1843, he was nonsuited — he had not proved his case — and was left liable for both sides’ costs. Each came to about £30 10s; he could pay neither.¹⁹

On 5 December 1843 he petitioned the Supreme Court as an insolvent — ‘Alexander Cook, of Parramatta Street, in the City of Sydney, Surgeon, now in Custody of the Sheriff’. He was in the debtors’ prison. His entire estate was ‘wearing apparel and household furniture’, valued at £5; he owned no land and was owed nothing; his only debts were the £61 1s 6d of costs from the lawsuit. Only his own solicitors and Segerson came to the creditors’ meeting on 19 December.¹⁹ It was the year his second son, James — the direct ancestor of this family — was born.²⁰

The family stayed in Parramatta Street: the electoral roll of 1845–46 lists ‘Cook Alexander Curry’ there in a dwelling house.¹⁸ Their daughter Maria was born on 11 February 1845, Jane on 10 March 1847 and Margaret on 9 July 1849.²⁰

To sea, and Whampoa

After 1846 Alexander disappears from the Sydney records. When his daughters were baptised, in 1853, his occupation was entered as ‘Mariner’ — a word suggesting that he had gone to sea as a ship’s surgeon, the trade in which he had first come to the colony.²⁰

In February 1852 the Sydney Morning Herald carried a two-line notice: ‘Died, at Whampoa, on the 11th August, on board the ship Statesman, Alexander Currie Cook, Esq., surgeon, aged forty years, after an illness of fourteen hours.’²¹ Whampoa was the deep-water anchorage for the foreign ships trading at Canton. An illness that killed in fourteen hours, in a Chinese anchorage in August, was very probably cholera. The news had taken six and a half months to reach his wife.

Five children orphaned

Anna Maria outlived him by two years. She died in Sydney on 19 September 1853, aged thirty-six, and was buried in the new cemetery at Camperdown.²² Her children were twelve, ten, eight, six and four.

Twenty-six days after her death, on 15 October 1853, the three girls — Maria, Jane and Margaret — were baptised together at St Andrew’s (Church of England) by the Rev. George King, the register giving their parents as ‘Alexander & Maria Cook, Princess St, Mariner’.²⁰ Their parents had married in a Presbyterian church; the girls were baptised into the Church of England, probably at the wish of whoever now took them in. Who raised the five children has not yet been discovered — perhaps the Rainys.

They grew up. Maria married Henry James Barrett of the Monaro at St Luke’s, Liverpool, in 1866; Margaret married Joseph Sindel of Queanbeyan at Adaminaby in 1872. Their wedding notices called their father ‘the late Alexander Currie Cook, M.D., of Sydney’ — ‘formerly of Glasgow’.²³ James, the second son, named his own son James Alexander, born in 1872; and it is that grandson’s marriage to Frances Helen Poole that the next Cook chapter follows.