The Poole Family
William & Frances Poole
The Warden’s Clerk of Dalmorton
A storekeeper on the Clarence River goldfields who rose to become Warden’s Clerk, Mining Registrar and postmaster of Dalmorton all at once — and was brought down by a Royal Commission, a perjury trial, and three years at Bathurst Gaol.
- 1873
- Married at Grafton — Frances was just sixteen
- 10+
- Children raised at Dalmorton
- 3
- Public offices held at once — storekeeper, postmaster, Warden’s Clerk
- 1896
- Released early from Bathurst Gaol, by special remission
William Frederick Poole was born in Ireland in 1847 and reached the Australian colonies by a route that has so far resisted every attempt to trace it. The only clue he ever gave — a ship called the Black Bird — turns out to have been a Melbourne-registered intercolonial coastal steamer, never a vessel that crossed from the United Kingdom; whatever brought him from Ireland, it left no name in his own record.1 By the early 1870s he was a storekeeper at Dalmorton, a gold-mining township on a tributary of the Clarence River known as the Boyd, or Little River, deep in the ranges behind Grafton.2
There, on a date not yet found, he met Frances Helen Cadden — a Sydney girl half his age. Frances had been born at Glebe on 7 June 1857, the daughter of William Cadden, a grocer, and Christina Cadden née Mitchell.3 William and Frances Cadden had themselves come from vividly different worlds — he a Lancashire runaway who had walked to San Francisco in the 1849 gold rush and stood at the Eureka Stockade before striking gold at Cawarral; she Glasgow-born, the daughter of an engineer.4 Their daughter Frances married William Poole at Grafton in 1873 — she was sixteen.5
A storekeeper’s family
The couple raised their family at Dalmorton through the 1870s and 1880s. A daughter was born there in May 1875 — very possibly Elizabeth Christina Mary, the eldest of the children whose own page follows this one — and at least nine more children followed over the next twenty years.6 William ran the town’s general store and, for a period, its post office, and kept a small herd of cattle and horses under his own registered brand; in 1888 five head were stolen from him, and in 1878 his storekeeping business failed, its assets assigned to trustees for the benefit of his creditors.7 The Caddens were Dalmorton people too: Frances’s father, William Thomas Cadden, held his own allotments at the corner of Shannon Street and the highway, and her brothers Frank and William stood, unsuccessfully, in the town’s 1892 Progress Committee election.20
He was, by December 1886, already managing a mine himself, in a private capacity — hauled into the Glen Innes Police Court that month by one of his own labourers over unpaid wages, and described in the court report simply as “manager of the Union mine at Dalmorton.” The labourer, David Knox, won a judgment of £8 3s. 3d. with costs on a claim for £28 10s. 10d.; he was married to Frances’s own elder sister, Mary Jane Keller Cadden, which made him — plaintiff against his employer — William Poole’s own brother-in-law.22
It was mining, though, that eventually gave Dalmorton its Warden’s Court, and gave William Poole the position that would define — and end — his public life. Some time before 1890 he was appointed Warden’s Clerk and Mining Registrar, a role paid the almost nominal salary of £10 a year, precisely because the holder was barred from any private interest in mining.8 He was also, by 1892, the town’s postmaster, and in that year the Postmaster-General moved to add telegraph supervision to his responsibilities as well.9
Three offices, one man
The decision to let Poole’s post office also house the new telegraph office — overturning an earlier promise to a rival site — reached Dalmorton on a Sunday in June 1892, and by the following month it had become the sole issue in a bitterly contested Progress Committee election.9 Immediately after the poll, some fifty-five miners and residents adjourned to the Assembly Hall and carried, unanimously, a motion that read: "That Mr. Poole, being Warden’s Clerk and being interested indirectly in mining in this district, is unfitted to hold the position of postmaster and supervisor of telegraphs." Among the defeated candidates in that same election were F. Cadden and W. Cadden — almost certainly Frances’s own brothers, prominent Dalmorton men in their own right.9
The Dalmorton meeting had accused Poole of exactly the thing a Royal Commission would prove eight months later: that the Warden’s Clerk, forbidden to touch mining for private profit, had done precisely that.
That Mr. Poole, being Warden’s Clerk and being interested indirectly in mining in this district, is unfitted to hold the position of postmaster and supervisor of telegraphs.
The Mount Marvel mine
A Royal Commission opened at the Dalmorton Warden’s Court on 29 March 1893, examining three separate charges against Poole across twenty-six witnesses and twenty-seven hours of hearings.10 It found what the town already suspected: that he held an undisclosed interest in the Mount Marvel gold mine, and had banked the proceeds — a Commercial Bank account opened at Grafton in August 1891 with a deposit of £120 in gold.11 He was dismissed from all his offices, effective 19 April 1893, and a police constable installed in his place.12
Committed for trial in October, he was tried before Mr Justice Windeyer at the Grafton Circuit Court and, on the second count of the information, found guilty of perjury — for a declaration he had sworn, in an attempt to protect the interest, denying it existed.13 He was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude. The judge, passing sentence, condemned his "abuse of his official position."13
A petition, and an early release
The local press took Poole’s side almost as soon as he was sentenced. A petition for clemency began circulating in Grafton and Glen Innes within a fortnight, and the Glen Innes Examiner ran a sympathetic editorial arguing that "three months, instead of three years, would have met the equities of the case" — pointing to his twenty-three years as a Dalmorton pioneer, his nine dependent children, and the fact that, whatever he had done, he had tried to injure no one but himself.14 The campaign did not end quickly: as late as January 1895, fifteen months after his conviction, the local paper was still reporting that "endeavours are being made to obtain a remission of the remainder of the sentence."15
It eventually succeeded. William Frederick Poole was released from Bathurst Gaol "by special remission" on 29 January 1896, having served a little over two years of his three-year sentence.16
Last years
What became of the family in the years immediately after is only partly known. A son, Thomas Charles Poole, was born about 1897 at Coolongolook, on the Manning River — evidence that William and Frances left the Clarence district for the New South Wales coast at some point after his release, well before they finally settled in Sydney.17 William Frederick Poole appears to have died at Balmain North about 1900, only a handful of years after his release, though the identification rests on a death index entry that gives no parents’ names and has not yet been confirmed against a full certificate.18
Frances lived on for almost three decades more. She died at her home in Ashfield on 28 May 1928, in her seventy-second year, and was buried in the Presbyterian section of Rookwood Cemetery — the denomination of her own 1857 baptism, and, her headstone records simply, "our mother."19
The Generation
The Children
At least eleven children were raised — ten of them at Dalmorton, and a youngest son, Thomas Charles, born after the family had already moved on to the Manning River district. Frances Helen carries the line onward — her son William James Cook married Ethel Ida Violet Robens, whose own family fills the chapters before this one.
Elizabeth Christina Mary Poole 1875–1958
The eldest of the eleven — a trained nurse who, as a girl, held a gold-mining lease in her own name at Dalmorton, and who spent her married life as a Congregational minister’s wife across three states.
Read their storyFrances Helen Poole 1876–1952
The daughter who carries this family onward — her marriage to James Alexander Cook, and their four children, now has a companion chapter of its own.
Continue the main storyMary Alice Maud Poole 1879–1929
The third daughter — married a South Grafton farmer, raised four sons, and died at fifty, a year before her widower and eldest boy turn up sharing a home on the Woolgoolga road.
Read their storyGrace M Poole 1881–1964
The fourth daughter — married into one of Coolongolook's oldest farming families, raised six children, and was still there forty years later, settling her husband's estate as his widow.
Read their storyWilliam Francis Poole 1882–
A tram conductor turned butcher who enlisted for the war in 1916, was divorced by his wife for adultery in 1921, and had resettled in Queensland by old age — almost certainly the brother who wrote, in 1954, to explain Joel John’s wartime disappearance.
Read their storyJoel John Poole 1886–
A Sydney tram conductor who vanished in 1913 — and was almost certainly found again, seventy years later, hiding in plain sight in the AIF's own records under the name "John Smith."
Read their storyDaisy J Poole 1888–1976
The longest-lived of the eleven — married in 1913 into one of Coolongolook’s biggest teamster families, and traceable almost year by year ever after on the district’s electoral rolls.
Read their storyBoyd Poole 1890–1891
Named, very likely, for the Boyd River at Dalmorton itself — and dead of bronchitis before his first birthday.
Read their storyFrederick Thornley Poole 1892–1970
Enlisted twice within a year of the war breaking out — first in the seizure of German New Guinea, then in the AIF proper — and left Pozières in 1916 having lost his left eye; nearly three years of reconstructive treatment, including at the pioneering Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup, preceded a quiet return to a market garden at Engadine, south of Sydney.
Read their storyHenry T Poole 1894–1908
Dead at thirteen at Taree — further evidence the family had settled in the Manning River district by then, where his youngest brother Thomas Charles was already growing up.
Read their storyThomas Charles Poole c.1897–1971
The youngest of the eleven — a Gallipoli and Western Front veteran, identified as theirs only decades later by his own death notice naming his brother and sister by name.
Read their storyThe Record
Sources & References
- 1
Arrival — the ship “Black Bird”
NSW gaol description sheets (Darlinghurst and Bathurst, 6 Nov 1893) both record “Ship: Black Bird” and the year of arrival as “not known.” Research into the vessel identifies her as an 1863-built, Melbourne-registered intercolonial steamer on the Newcastle–Melbourne and NSW–Queensland coastal trade — never a transoceanic emigrant ship — so she was most likely only the final coastal leg of Poole’s journey, not the ship that carried him from Ireland.
- 2
Dalmorton, early 1870s
Glen Innes Examiner, 3 November 1893, “The Dalmorton Perjury Case”: “During the past 23 years Mr. W. F. Poole has been a resident of Dalmorton… For a number of years he kept a store at Dalmorton and also had the post-office.”
- 3
Frances Helen Cadden’s birth and parentage
NSW BDM birth index, Frances Cadden, reg. 3211/1857, registered Glebe; NSW Presbyterian Baptisms register, Frances Cadden, born 7 June 1857, baptised 9 August 1857, parents William Cadden (grocer) and Christina, of Glebe.
- 4
William and Christina Cadden
William Thomas Cadden obituary, “A Pioneer Miner,” 1898; Christina Cadden (née Mitchell) death certificate, NSW BDM reg. 1208/1907 — Glasgow-born; the certificate names her father as ‘Robert Mitchell, engineer’, but he was in fact John Mitchell, blacksmith and ‘practical engineer’ — Robert was her brother (see the William & Christina Cadden chapter, ref. 2).
- 5
Marriage, 1873
NSW BDM marriage index: William Poole and Frances Cadden, reg. 2611/1873, Grafton.
- 6
The children
Birth notice, Clarence and Richmond Examiner and New England Advertiser, 1 June 1875: “POOLE — On May 19, at her residence, Dalmorton, Little River, the wife of WILLIAM F. POOLE, of a daughter” — not yet definitively matched to a name, but consistent with Elizabeth Christina Mary Poole (1875–1958), the eldest known child. Eleven children in total are recorded by family record: Elizabeth Christina Mary (1875–1958), Frances Helen (1876–1952), Mary Alice Maud (1879–1929), Grace M. (1881–1964), William Francis (b. 1882), Joel John (b. 1886), Daisy J. (1888–1976), Boyd (1890–1891, died in infancy of bronchitis), Frederick Thornley (1892–1952), Henry T. (1894–1908, d. Taree) and Thomas Charles (c.1897–1971), the youngest, born after the family had left Dalmorton for the Manning River district. Thomas Charles is confirmed as a child of this marriage not by a birth record — none has been found — but by his own 1971 death notice, which names his siblings “Frederick (deceased) and Daisy (Mrs Batchelor, Port Macquarie)” by name (see reference 17).
- 7
Storekeeping, stock and insolvency
NSW Government Gazette, 15 October 1878: deed of assignment, William F. Poole, storekeeper of Dalmorton, insolvent. NSW brand register (Horses and Cattle), William F. Poole, Dalmorton, Clarence River, application 38990. NSW Police Gazette, list of stock stolen, week ending 19 December 1888: five head taken from William Poole, Dalmorton, since February that year.
- 8
Warden’s Clerk and Mining Registrar
NSW Civil Service list: “Poole, W. F. … Warden’s Clerk, Mining Registrar, &c., Dalmorton, Mines.” Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 31 May 1890 (“Telegraphic”): “Mr. W. F. Poole is gazetted Warden’s bailiff at Dalmorton.” NSW Government Gazette, Ordinary Licenses list: William F. Poole, Dalmorton, licence no. 2870.
- 9
The 1892 telegraph-office controversy
Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 28 June 1892 (“Dalmorton Post Office,” reprinting a General Post Office letter of 20 June 1892) and 9 July 1892 (“Dalmorton” — Progress Committee election results and the public meeting resolution).
- 10
The Royal Commission
Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 21 March 1893 (notice convening the inquiry, 29 March 1893) and 4 April 1893 (“Chatsworth Island” column, “Inquiry at Dalmorton”: twenty-six witnesses, three charges, twenty-seven hours of hearings, charges brought by “Mr. Ford”).
- 11
The Mount Marvel mine and the bank account
Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 7 October 1893, “Grafton Police Court”: evidence of E. C. Platt, Commercial Bank accountant, on an account opened by Poole in August 1891 with a deposit of £120 in gold; evidence naming Bushell, Shea, M’Kenzie and L. Bonnar as the other parties interested in the Mount Marvel mine.
- 12
Dismissal
NSW Government Gazette No. 327, 16 May 1893: dismissal of W. F. Poole as Warden’s Clerk, Mining Registrar and Bailiff at Dalmorton, effective 19 April 1893. Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 29 April 1893 (“Dalmorton”), reporting the dismissal locally.
- 13
Trial and sentence
Glen Innes Examiner, 20 October 1893, “The Charge against W. T. Poole”; NSW Circuit Court criminal register, entry 272, Grafton Circuit Court, 17 October 1893, before Mr Justice Windeyer: guilty on the second count of perjury, three years’ penal servitude.
- 14
The clemency campaign begins
Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 4 November 1893 (“Editorial Brevities”: a petition for remission in course of signature); Glen Innes Examiner, 3 November 1893, “The Dalmorton Perjury Case” (reprinted in the Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 7 November 1893).
- 15
The campaign continues
Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 5 January 1895 (“Editorial Brevities”).
- 16
Release
Bathurst Gaol entrance/discharge register, entry 523: William F. Poole, disposed of “by special remission,” 29 January 1896. NSW Police Gazette, 5 February 1896, “Return of Prisoners Discharged to Freedom.”
- 17
Thomas Charles Poole — identification
Three independent records place Thomas Charles Poole in this family. (1) NSW marriage register, Berwood district, 2 December 1922, St Peter’s Church: Thomas Charles Poole, bachelor, bricklayer, born Coolongolook, NSW, aged 24, married Adeline Maude Odgers; his father is recorded as “Frederick Poole (dec’d)” and his mother as “Frances Cadden” — not marked deceased, consistent with William Frederick Poole’s death c.1900 and Frances Helen Cadden’s death in 1928. A witness at the wedding was “F. Poole,” very likely a brother. (2) NSW marriage register, 6 August 1938, St James’, Croydon: Thomas Charles Poole, widower, bricklayer, born Coolongolook, NSW, aged 41, married Beryl Edna Amos; parents again recorded as “Frederick Poole (dec’d)” and “Frances Cadden (dec’d),” both now deceased. (3) Decisively, his death notice, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 June 1971 — “POOLE, Thomas Charles.—June 5, 1971, at his residence, 11 Ridge Street, Cabramatta, dearly beloved husband of Beryl, loved father of Colin (deceased)… fond brother of Frederick (deceased) and Daisy (Mrs Batchelor, Port Macquarie). Aged 73 years” — names two of William and Frances Poole’s other children by first name, putting the identification beyond reasonable doubt even without a birth record. His two marriage records disagree by about a year on his exact birth date (implying 1896–97 and 1897–98 respectively), so his birth is given here as “c.1897.”
- 18
William Frederick Poole’s death
NSW BDM death index: Poole, William F., reg. 4670/1900, Balmain North — died 5 June 1900 at Paul Street, Balmain, aged 51 (indexed as "William Frederick Pool"). Identification reached by elimination among some two dozen same-named candidates found in the NSW indexes for this period, none of whose own recorded details (spouse, parents, place, decade) fit William and Frances Poole; no death or funeral notice has been found in Trove, and no matching burial appears in the Balmain Cemetery register, so the identification is not yet confirmed against a full death certificate.
- 19
Frances Helen Cadden’s death
NSW BDM death index: Poole, Frances, reg. 6299/1928, Ashfield (father William T., mother Christina). Sydney Morning Herald, 29 May 1928, funeral notice: residence 1 Beatrice-street, Ashfield, burial Presbyterian Cemetery, Rookwood. Headstone, Rookwood Cemetery, Section 6E, Row 23: “our mother. In her 72nd year.”
- 20
The Cadden family at Dalmorton
NSW Department of Lands, “Map of the Village of Dalmorton and Suburban Lands” (2nd edition, surveyed 1920): two allotments at the corner of Shannon Street and the highway marked “William Cadden.” Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 9 July 1892, “Dalmorton”: F. Cadden and W. Cadden among the defeated candidates in that year’s Progress Committee election.
- 21
Henry T. Poole, 1894–1908
NSW BDM birth index: Poole, Henry T., reg. district Glen Innes, 1895 (birth 19 December 1894), father William F., mother Frances, reg. no. 3385. NSW BDM death index: Poole, Henry T., reg. district Taree, 1908 (death 28 March 1908), mother Frances, reg. no. 7428.
- 22
Manager of the Union mine — sued by his own brother-in-law
Glen Innes Examiner and General Advertiser, 21 December 1886, “Glen Innes Police Court”: “WAGES.—David Knox sued W. F. Poole for £28 10s. 10d. The defendant is manager of the Union mine at Dalmorton, and Knox had been working at the reef. After hearing both sides, the P.M. gave plaintiff a verdict for £8 3s. 3d. with costs.” David Knox married Mary Jane Keller Cadden, Frances Helen Cadden’s elder sister (see “William & Christina Cadden”).