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Index in 1989 revealed that Eliza Hannah (not Elizabeth) gave birth to a baby boy at Morrisons
in 1864. Three other children followed, the last in 1870. In each case the father was Charles
Glasson. Eliza, as we must call her now, clearly rejoined her husband a year or so after 1861,
undoubtedly taking her first two children with her and probably travelling with Mary Jane and
John Ennor. And if the first child of their reunion was born in Australia in 1864, it would seem
highly likely that she arrived there in or before 1863.
That year Eliza was 36; Mary Jane was 34. We may safely presume that the baby girl born
seven years later (in 1870), who died the same year, was her last child.
416
I The Butchers of Ravenshoe
The fourth child and first daughter of John and Mary Honeycombe was Jane Winifred, known
as Jenny. She was born at Crocodile Creek in 1885, on 27 December, and attended the shanty
school at Crocodile Creek for about three months until the family left the district in 1892.
Her father, John, worked in the mines around Crocodile Creek (now known as Bouldercombe)
and managed one or two. However, he is described as a 'miner1 on the birth certificate of his
second daughter, Annie Frances, born in February 1891 at Union Hill.
Two years later, Mary Honeycombe and her (by now) five surviving children - little Frank had
been killed in an accident in 1881 - were back in Charters Towers, where she and John had
married. Here her seventh child, Ellen, was born in August 1893.
About this time the family split up. Mary had a mental breakdown and John took his two eldest
boys down south with him; and the three little girls were put in the care of Granny Chapman in
Charters Towers. Jenny was eight.
Her father returned to the Towers and worked there as a mine manager until 1898, when he
disappears from this history, not reappearing until 1904 in Western Australia. His children were
apparently never restored either to him or to their mother.
In due course Jenny became a domestic servant in one of the hotels in Charters Towers. But we
lose sight of her until her marriage in Cairns in 1908.
What was she doing in Cairns, so far to the north? She had met her future husband, George
Butcher, in Charters Towers, and had known him for several years, since they were children.
He had been at school there and worked for a time in local mines. Perhaps, like other young
girls on the gold-fields (and like her mother) she discovered she was pregnant, or thought she
was, and in order to avoid any social embarrassment, she married him far away from her
hometown and during one of his journeys as a teamster. At any rate, they married in Cairns on
12 February, 1908; both were 22.
George Trainor Butcher was born on 11 December 1885 at Georgetown, halfway on the long,
long road, then a track, between Cairns and the Gulf of Carpentaria. He was one of twelve
children, whose father, John Butcher, hailed from London; his mother was an Irish girl,
Margaret Trainor, of County Armagh. It was a rough and rugged life for the family, with the
father, John, often away. As a carrier and a teamster, he drove the bullock wagon-trains that
serviced the growing communities in the outback and on the goldfields. Riflemen guarded the
wagon-trains, as robbers known as bush-rangers (originally escaped convicts) could sell the
supplies or make use of them themselves.
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