Stephen & Sarah Robens

The family’s Australian story begins with Stephen Robens — a Sussex-born stonemason and bricklayer who became, in his later years, one of Sydney’s first city missionaries — and his wife Sarah Ann Catt, who left England as a young married couple in 1839 to build a new life in the colony.¹ Their house in Surry Hills remained the family’s anchor for more than sixty years. It was their son Thomas who, through his marriage to Mary Rebecca Jane Jeffries, carried the line forward into the next chapter.

A Memoir in His Own Hand

After Stephen’s death in 1875 a memoir was published, drawn substantially from an autobiography he had written himself.¹ Its opening notice set out the intent plainly: to give “a few particulars of his life and death; not for the purpose of eulogizing the dead, but for the benefit of the living.”¹

The remainder consists very largely of Stephen’s own words. Read alongside the surviving parish, civil and institutional records, it makes him one of the best-documented people in this whole history — a labouring man who left an account of himself.

Threepence a Day, and a Walk to St Leonard’s

Stephen recorded that he was born about 1812 in the parish of Bexhill, Sussex — the youngest of eight, four sons and four daughters.¹ His father “was a labouring man, very regular in his ways; never got drunk in his life”; his parents “were married seventy years, and lived together all that long time,” his father dying at ninety-five and his mother at eighty-five.¹ His mother “was a great reader of the Bible,” and taught him to read; writing he picked up at a night school, having otherwise “very little schooling.”¹

Being poor, he “had to go to work at an early age,” and laboured for threepence a day for two years before deciding he would work for such wages no longer.¹ Without his mother’s leave to refuse, he walked to St Leonard’s with a shilling in his pocket and bread and cheese in a bag. One man turned him away; a clerk of works, taking pity on the boy’s persistence, set him to carrying mortar.¹ By the end of that first week his pay had gone from threepence to two shillings a day, and within a few weeks he was bound apprentice for four years — becoming, in his own words, “an expert mason” and “a very good workman.”¹ In winter, when mason’s work was scarce, he cleared snow from doorsteps and rooftops before dawn, and “sometimes earn more money than he could at his trade.”¹

Cricket, Courtship, and a Sussex Marriage

Before his marriage Stephen was “a member of a cricket club” and had “become expert at the noble game.” He was also given to dancing, and “used to spend whole nights in that amusement.”¹ It was the young woman who became his wife — “not fond of company” — who induced him to give up the dancing parties. He held on to the cricket until he left England.¹

The parish marriage register of St Mary’s Chapel, in the parish of St Mary in the Castle, Hastings, records that on 4 June 1838 Stephen Robens, aged 26, bachelor, bricklayer, of St Leonards, married Sarah Catt, aged 23, spinster, servant, of 11 Russell Street, Hastings.² Both fathers are recorded as labourers; the witnesses were Thomas and Harriet Catt.²

Sarah had been baptised on 23 July 1815 at Salehurst, Sussex, recorded at one month old, daughter of Thomas Catt and Mimah Catt.³ A generation earlier, parish registers from nearby Brightling record the marriages of both sets of parents — Thomas Robbins to Elizabeth Gorring on 12 May 1786, and Thomas Catt to Jemima Smith on 20 November 1807.⁴

The Neptune, 1839

Stephen recalled the day he and his “dear young wife” went to enquire about a passage. Finding that only “a man and his wife without children” would be taken, and fearing he would lose the place before he could fetch her, he went back for Sarah and the couple were accepted together.¹ “We had to get ready in a few days,” he wrote, “but the hardest work we had to do was leaving our dear friends, especially our fathers and mothers.”¹

The immigration registers corroborate the crossing. Stephen’s “Married Male Immigrant” record shows him arriving by the Neptune at government expense — a native of Hastings, son of Thomas Robens and Elizabeth Gorringe, calling bricklayer, twenty-six years of age, Protestant, able to read and write, health “very good.”⁵ Sarah’s companion record describes her as a native of Hastings, daughter of Thomas Catt, brickmaker of Hurst Green, calling laundress, twenty-four.⁵

Shipping notices extend the picture. The Neptune sailed from London on 1 June 1839 under Master Ferris and Surgeon-Superintendent David Geddes, carrying 284 government emigrants under Dr Lang’s bounty scheme, and came up Sydney Harbour on 1 October 1839.⁶ Nine passengers died on the four-month voyage. The passenger list is dominated by Sussex farm labourers, a number from the very district around Salehurst, Robertsbridge and Etchingham where Sarah’s own family lived — the couple emigrated as part of a wider community of East Sussex families, not in isolation.⁶

A Bit of Ground, and a Small House

Stephen wrote that he “was at work” within days of landing, and “soon saved a little money, bought a bit of ground, and built a small house at Surry Hills” — work a trained mason was well equipped for.¹ The Revised List of Electors for Cook Ward, 1851–52, lists Stephen Robins with a freehold on Holborn-street.⁷ A later Sands Directory entry records “Robens, S., 11 Union St., Surry hills,” immediately alongside “Robens, Thomas, boot upper manufacturer, 98 Bathurst st.” — almost certainly his son.⁸

The two street names are the same place. A Sydney Municipal Council notice, on the motion of Alderman Rowe, ordered a schedule of street-name alterations that included: “Union-street, in extension of High Holborn-street, to be altered to High Holborn-street.”⁹ So Stephen’s 1875 death registration gives his residence as Union Street,¹⁰ while Sarah’s in 1900 gives 43 High Holborn Street¹¹ — one house, renumbered around them. The 1901 census confirms Sarah at No. 43, a sole-occupant household.¹² The house still stands: a modest sandstone terrace beside its twin at No. 41.

One Sunday Morning in 1846

For some years after their arrival the couple were, in Stephen’s words, “without religion,” attending church only occasionally — until one Sunday morning in 1846 when his wife asked him why he did not go to chapel.¹ He went, and was struck by the preaching of the Rev. W. B. Boyce, and particularly by a hymn line that seemed addressed to him directly: “Let those refuse to sing, who never knew our God.”¹ Sarah’s own obituary tells the same turn from her side: walking from Surry Hills to Waverley, she too heard Boyce preach on the new birth.¹³

Stephen attended a class meeting at the invitation of a Mr Jesson and kept attending for twelve months before, one morning at his knees in prayer, the words “Thy faith hath made thee whole” were applied to his mind, and he “was happy in God.”¹ From that day his class leader called him “brother Robens.” He taught Sunday school for eight years without missing a session, served six years as a canvasser, and led a prayer meeting from his own front room for twenty-four years.¹ Appointed a class leader some five years after his conversion, he watched his class grow from twelve members to sixty-five before it was divided between two other leaders.¹

Sarah’s path ran alongside his. Under the Cleveland Street circuit she joined the class of Mr Austin, then became a class leader herself, and was present at the erection of the circuit’s first church.¹³

The First Missionary — and, for a Year, the Only One

The Sydney City Mission was founded in 1862, its committee drawn from Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian congregations. Its guiding principle was said to be “Need not Creed,” though in practice relief came with conditions: those offered honest work who refused it could be denied further help.¹⁴ In 1868 the Mission opened a City Night Kitchen and Soup Kitchen in Kent Street, feeding and sheltering some seventy-five men a night, who were required to leave by seven the next morning.¹⁴

Committee minutes record that on 7 August 1862 the Mission resolved to advertise for missionaries, and that on 11 September S. Robens was appointed a missionary on probation.¹⁵ From 1 October the city was divided into four districts; Stephen was assigned District No. 1 — “between Cumberland Street North and George Street and Argyle and Essex Streets,” the Rocks and city area, a long way from his own home in Surry Hills.¹⁵

The Mission’s early years were financially precarious in the extreme. By January 1864 its account was overdrawn and it could not pay its missionaries; a special meeting was called to ask two of the three temporary missionaries to resign for want of funds.¹⁵ A published institutional history states plainly that the Mission “nearly folded when, in 1864, private donations had dried up to such an extent that it could only continue with one full-time ‘Missionary,’ Stephen Robens.”¹⁴ For a period, the continued existence of the Sydney City Mission rested very largely on one man’s willingness to keep working unpaid.

His work is also documented from outside the family. Giving evidence to the New South Wales Public Charities Commission in 1873, as a visitor of eleven years’ standing to the Hyde Park Barracks Destitute Asylum, he testified that inmates were segregated by religion and that Protestant women received more visitors and additional comforts such as tea and sugar. He was notably reluctant to elaborate further — a caution a later historian has suggested may reflect concern for the Mission’s standing with the Asylum’s matron.¹⁶

Michael Bowmaker, who would serve as the Mission’s third missionary from 1886 until 1903, later paid tribute to Stephen as his own “spiritual mentor.”¹⁷ Their acquaintance dated to 1857 — more than a decade before Stephen’s formal appointment — and shows him already bringing others to faith through his trade connections well before it became a vocation.

Safe in the Arms of Jesus

Stephen remained active almost to the end. He was out working the day before he died. The final seizure came suddenly, and all the family were away from the house except his wife; only the timely arrival of a son-in-law meant Sarah was not alone.¹ He had strength to say “Safe in the arms of Jesus” before he died — words the memoir likens to those of his namesake, the first Christian martyr.¹ A verse found afterwards in his pocket-book, in his own hand, was offered as a description of the man: “Mid trial and peril he life’s journey trod; yet walked securely, for he walked with God.”¹ The memoir was signed only “J.W.”

Civil records confirm it: Stephen Robens died on 19 June 1875 at Union Street, Surry Hills, aged 63, occupation recorded as city missionary, after an illness of about three weeks attributed to pneumonia.¹⁰ Funeral notices give the procession moving to the Wesleyan Chapel, Bourke-street, and thence to the Necropolis, placed separately by five sons-in-law — J. E. Huthnance, R. D. Sippe, G. J. Bennett, J. Radford and W. G. Marr — and by his two surviving sons, Thomas and Wesley.¹⁸ Probate named as executors John Jesson (the same Mr Jesson who had first invited him to a class meeting nearly thirty years earlier), William Hayes, and his son Thomas.¹⁹

He was buried on 21 June 1875 at Haslem’s Creek Cemetery — later renamed Rookwood. The shared headstone in the Wesleyan section still reads: “In loving remembrance of Stephen Robens, for many years a city missionary, who exchanged this world for a better on the 19th June 1875, aged 63 years, leaving a widow and 9 children to mourn their loss. His last words were ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus.’ ‘He went about doing good.’”²⁰

Sarah Ann Robens, 1875–1900

Sarah outlived her husband by nearly twenty-five years, staying on at the house in Surry Hills and continuing her own involvement with the Mission: its published history records that “his widow continued her interest in the Mission for a further 23 years, collecting funds for its support, until her death at the age of 85.”¹⁵

She died on 17 March 1900 at 43 High Holborn Street, of old age and cardiac failure.¹¹ As with her husband a generation before, the informant on the registration was her son-in-law R. D. Sippe. Her obituary describes a peaceful death “in the bosom of her family,” and records that the missionary Mr Bowmaker had visited not long before the end and remarked that she did not look comfortable. Her reply was written down: “Why should I not? He makes all my bed in my affliction, and makes it well, too.”¹³ That this was the same Michael Bowmaker whom Stephen had led to faith in their own front room in 1857 gives the exchange its particular weight.

At her funeral at the Necropolis, beside her husband’s grave, the mourners sang “Safe in the arms of Jesus” — the same words Stephen had spoken at his own death twenty-five years earlier.¹³ She was survived by six daughters and two sons, fifty-four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.¹³