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miner, with a neat moustache and well-cut hair and pointed, pixie-like ears. According to his
daughter, Mabel, he grew the moustache to mask his teeth, which projected 'a little tiny bit...
Mine did too till I had them out.' He was about 5'8".
Lena was very small and slim and dark, her Spanish blood glowing in her round face and eyes.
When she was young she had dimples in her cheeks. She was nearly a year older than Bob,
having been born in October 1882.
They apparently found each other irresistible. Their friendship bloomed and flowered, and in
July 1901, when he was still 17 and she 18, she gave birth to a baby girl, Gladys, in Townsville.
The birth occurred a year before Queensland's worst-ever drought: for seven months, from
May to November, only eight points of rain fell in Charters Towers.
The fact that the baby was born in Townsville and not at home in the Towers, seems to indicate
that Lena went away to avoid parental disapproval and local moral censure. Was there also
some disapproval in the Thomas family - they were Catholics - of Bob, who was both young
and impecunious and was no doubt blamed for Lena's misfortune? Was he in fact the father?
After all, they may not have met until after Gladys was born. And she was christened Gladys
Charles Thomas.
At any rate, it was not until three years later, a week or so after Bob's 21 st birthday, that he
and Lena were wed: on 26 August, 1904, in Charters Towers.
Soon after the wedding Bob was smitten with double pneumonia. He was off work for several
months.
About this time, on 26 October, the most violent storm ever to hit the area struck the Towers.
Fred Bagnall's history of the town, Golden Heritage, relates: 'The goods-shed and engine room
at the railway were stripped of their roofs and sheets of iron were scattered over a wide area.
St George's church hall was lifted bodily and deposited in a nearby paddock. A large building at
the Brilliant mine was entirely flattened. The hail which accompanied the storm was the largest
ever seen in the Charters Towers, and was still lying in the streets the following day. Every
garden in the city was stripped of its foliage and birds and domestic fowls were killed in
hundreds. When the storm abated, the streets were covered in ice, and the guttering on most
houses, and in some cases the verandahs, collapsed.'
Lena Thomas was one of the nine children of John Thomas and Mary Bethel. A short and
swarthy Spaniard, John Thomas was popularly known as Black Jack, as were the two gold-
strikes and mines he discovered in Charters Towers and Ravenswood. Said to have been born
in Gibraltar in 1825, he came to Queensland (via Sydney) in search of gold. His English was
never very good, and very limited when he arrived in Sydney. Although he claimed to have had
a father who was a solicitor and an uncle who was an admiral, this seems unlikely, as he could
neither read nor write. But he may, as he claimed, have served on a
300
British warship in the Crimean War. His name, John Thomas, was the English version, it is said,
of its Spanish original.
The first gold rush in Queensland had taken place in 1858 at Canoona, about 40 miles north of
Rookhampton. Hither came John Thomas in 1864. But the field soon petered out, as did others
in the Rookhampton district and further north near Drummond. John Thomas moved on to Peak
Downs and Monish. The Gympie field was discovered in October 1867, and that at
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