Thomas & Mary Rebecca Robens

Thomas Robens, eldest son of the city missionary, married Mary Rebecca Jane Jeffries at Bathurst in December 1871.¹ The wedding took place in the bride’s home town — but the couple’s married life was built almost entirely in Sydney’s inner west. Newtown, Marrickville, Petersham, Leichhardt, Ashfield: this is where Thomas worked as a saddler, and where all twelve of their children were born between 1872 and 1896.²

A Missionary’s Son and a Saddler’s Daughter

Thomas was born on 15 April 1848, the fifth child and eldest son of Stephen Robens and Sarah Ann Catt — preceded by four elder sisters.³ His standing in the family is fixed by the 1875 probate notice for his father’s will, granted to two named executors and to “testator’s son, Thomas Robens.”⁴

Mary Rebecca Jane Jeffries was born on 20 December 1852 at Pitt Town, on the Hawkesbury River, eldest daughter of Archibald Joseph Jeffries, a saddler, and his wife Mary Jane, née Mills.⁵ The Jeffries family later settled at Bathurst, where Archibald Joseph built a long career at his trade and was for many years a prominent member of the Manchester Unity Oddfellows, at one time serving as Provincial Grand Master.⁶

The two were married on 13 December 1871 at Bathurst by the Rev. Mr Woolnough.¹ The marriage notice, published independently in both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sydney Mail, records the groom as “eldest son of Mr. Stephen Robens, city missionary, of Sydney” and the bride as “eldest daughter of Mr. A. J. Jeffries, saddler, Bathurst.”⁷ In hindsight the notice foreshadows the marriage itself: wed in the bride’s town, they made their home in the groom’s.

Seaview Street, and a Family on the Move

All twelve children were born across a handful of adjoining inner-western suburbs over twenty-four years — Sydney (1872, 1874, 1882), Newtown (1875, 1878, 1880), Petersham (1884, 1887) and Marrickville (1890, 1891, 1894, 1896).² Census and directory records corroborate the drift. The 1891 census found Thomas Robens and a household of nine at Seaview Street, Marrickville;⁸ by 1901 the family had moved a short distance to 375 Parramatta Road, Leichhardt.⁹ Sands Directory entries place him on Sebastopol Street, Marrickville, and as a saddler at 183 Lion Street, Ashfield.¹⁰

His trade turns up in the court reports too. In July 1897 he appeared as an entirely incidental figure in a Newtown police court case: a young bootmaker had stolen a quantity of buggy harness and sold it “to a saddler named Thomas Robens, at Newtown.”¹¹

A fuller account of his working life, published after his death, describes three phases — in earlier manhood a traveller for leather grindery, then for a considerable period in business on his own account in Newtown, and in his final years turning a lifelong hobby of gardening into an occupation.¹²

Praiseworthy Devotion

In 1903 Mary Rebecca Jane returned to Bathurst to nurse her father through his final illness. Archibald Joseph Jeffries — blind in old age — died on 19 May 1903, aged seventy-one. His obituary singles out “his eldest daughter” for her “praiseworthy devotion and attention,” and lists her among his surviving daughters as “Mrs. T. Robins (Sydney)” — confirming that her own home, even then, was in Sydney rather than Bathurst.⁶

Cross Street, Baulkham Hills

By the last years of his life Thomas appears to have spent time back in Bathurst — one obituary describes him as “a former well known and respected resident” who had been “in the boot trade in Bathurst.”¹³ How that sits alongside the Newtown-and-gardening account given elsewhere is not clear, and the two obituaries do not agree.

Thomas Robens died on 15 November 1928 at his residence in Cross Street, Baulkham Hills, aged eighty, having been in indifferent health for the previous twelve months.¹²¹³ His funeral was held the next day, Friday 16 November, to the Methodist portion of Rookwood Cemetery, the service conducted by the Rev. Mr Putland.¹⁴

Obituaries ran in both the Bathurst National Advocate and the Parkes Western Champion — the latter because his son Harold was a well-known Parkes resident. Between them they name all twelve children and where each was living in 1928: sons Archie (North Ryde), William (Bathurst), Aubrey (Western Australia), Harold (Parkes) and Norman (Queensland); daughters Mesdames Cook (Wentworthville), Grieve (Merrylands) and Gage (Ashfield); and the unmarried Misses Alice and Stella, both still at Baulkham Hills, Rhoda at Surry Hills and Ida in Sydney.¹⁴

Back to Keppel Street

After Thomas’s death Mary Rebecca Jane returned to Bathurst. A Bathurst paper reported in May 1929 that she “has returned to Bathurst to reside,”¹⁵ and the 1930 Commonwealth Electoral Roll confirms it: Mary Rebecca Jane, with her unmarried daughters Ida May Charlotte and Stella Eva, at 196 Keppel Street — in the same city, as it happened, where her son William Wesley was then working as a saddler on Lort Street.¹⁶

The Bathurst years were shorter than they look. She and Ida are at 196 Keppel Street on the 1930 and 1932 rolls and gone from the 1934 one; the Castle Hill rolls pick them up at Railway Street, Baulkham Hills, in 1933, and hold them there through 1934, 1936 and 1937.¹⁷²¹ The return south therefore fell between the 1932 and 1933 enrolments — about three years back in Bathurst, not seven.

It made for two Baulkham Hills addresses rather than one. Martha Alice kept Cross Street, the street in which Thomas had died, across the same run of years, a short distance from her mother and sister on Railway Street.²¹ Stella Eva alone stayed behind in the Central West.

Mary Rebecca Jane Robens died in April 1942 at Parramatta, aged eighty-nine, and was buried at Rookwood General Cemetery.¹⁸