William Montague Clarence Campbell, Schoolteacher

William Montague Clarence Campbell, Schoolteacher

Between 1868 and 1874 William Montague Clarence Campbell was the schoolmaster at the small South Coast schools at Eurobodalla and Runnymead (now Runnyford). Following this, for a short time, he was in charge of Mogo School.

Campbell died near Runnymead on 25th April 1878. His death certificate indicated his father was ‘George IV’ and his father’s occupation was ‘King of England’.

So, who was this ‘William Montague Clarence Campbell’?

He definitely was not the bastard son of King George IV...but his life was interesting, and its story is certainly worth relating – if only as a minor footnote to our local history:

William Montague Clarence Campbell started life in 1808 in New York as William Martin Leggett. His parents were school teachers and he received his early education from them. He was raised in Canada, became a teacher and then a missionary in the Wesleyan Church, married Mary Anne Stevens in 1839, and received considerable praise for some early poetic works. He left Canada in 1845.

He joined the British army as William Alonzo Campbell and, in 1848, sailed to Australia as part of a detachment acting as a convict guard. In January 1851, at Bowenfels near Lithgow, he married Charlotte Crawford, a schoolteacher and governess, who had arrived in Sydney in 1849 as matron to a shipload of Irish Famine orphan girls. It seems likely that this marriage was bigamous as there is no record of him having divorced Mary Anne.

In 1852 ‘William A. Montague Leggett M.A.’ (there is no evidence he ever received, or even studied for, that degree) applied for a teaching position with the National School in Bowenfels but was unsuccessful. Apparently, he was reluctant to face the usual formal examination at the Model National School at Fort Street in Sydney and was branded as a character of “irregular habits” (i.e. he was a drinker). So, in 1853, William and Charlotte Campbell opened a ‘People’s Own School’ in Bowenfels that successfully attracted pupils. Whilst at Bowenfels, William started calling himself both ‘Montague Clarence Campbell’ and ‘William Montague Clarence Campbell’.

The family then lived in what has been described as ‘genteel poverty’ with William working variously as a journalist, gold-digger, manager of a sheep and cattle station, kitchen attendant at a soup kitchen in the slums of Sydney, and as a police spy. In 1864 they opened the ‘Woollahra Academy’ in Sydney – ‘a grand name for what was a modest affair’. The following year they moved ‘to a little Church of England school at Sackville Reach on the Hawkesbury before, as William later complained, he was “thrown out of employment by my conscientious resistance of puseyism (the High Church and Catholic principles of the Oxford Movement of the followers of Dr E B Pusey) and intolerance.” The family left just in time. Within four days the flood of June 1867 had swept away both school and schoolmaster’s house.’

Historian Chris Vening continues the story: ‘Towards the end of 1868, after William had been unemployed for seven months and with Charlotte ill, his begging letters to officialdom were finally answered. (This may have been the result of a letter to Premier Henry Parkes from an Equerry to the Duke of Edinburgh, who was then touring Australia, which read ‘His Royal Highness has desired me to ask you to enter on the list of applicants for Government Employment here, the name of a man, for whom His Royal Highness would like to hear that something had been done, viz: Mr. William Montague Clarence Campbell, Dixon Street, Sydney.’) The family embarked in December for distant Eurobodalla on the south coast of New South Wales where he had been given charge of the little public school. There, on the banks of the Tuross River, in a hut (“a rookery quite unfit to be a dwelling-place”) rented from the widow of the poet Charles Harpur (see his story on this website) the family struggled for a year on a rural teacher’s stipend.

In debt and with his enrolments falling, William desperately sought a transfer. Then, in a bizarre twist, he wrote a long letter to the Council of Education accusing the chief member of the local school board, prominent landowner and publican Michael Manusu, of open adultery and complicity in two cases of child murder – one by means of “steel filings” – and secret burial. “Even an imaginary cry of innocent blood in the land,” William wrote, “is too horrible to think of.” Manusu took the allegations to the police and, when the Attorney General declined to prosecute for libel, instituted civil proceedings. He won £10 damages and, said the judge, would have been awarded ten times the amount had he sought it.

With the school closed up, the Campbells – near starvation, if his letters can be credited – somehow held on at Eurobodalla. William reported for the Sydney press on the savage Tuross floods of May 1870, describing how he and [his son] Rodolph fought through the waters to the aid of Mary Harpur at “Euroma” next door. It was some of his best journalism. He wrote a lament over the recent grave of Charles Harpur (who had died on his farm a few months before the Campbells arrived), and nature verse such as “A Night-Visit to the Oaks at Eurobodalla.” Then in August he found what he sought so fervently: a new start, up the coast at the little settlement of Runnymede on the Buckenbowra River. In that part of the world he would spend his remaining years...

William swept in, dazzled the locals, and opened a little provisional school, his modest fees augmented by a salary of £48 from the Council of Education in Sydney. It was a struggle: he had to purchase with his own money a boat to ferry his pupils over the river. The only teacher’s residence was a hut three miles up the river, along a bush road with creeks and gullies to cross and the often-flooded Reedy Swamp to wade through. In time enrolments dwindled and, as at Sackville Reach and Eurobodalla, William fell out with school patrons and parents. “I endure great hardships,” he lamented. “Six miles trudging per day, to & from school, – no fire there all winter for the want of a chimney! Always at my post at proper hours! All for £48 per ann. Bland cheating me out of my hard earnings. I can get nothing from him. Yahoos getting into my schoolhouse through the aperture for a chimney, writing obscenities in my girls’ books, and all manner of stuff on my very blackboard. Three years and a half among so uncivilized a people have almost wearied me out but, as I began the school, I am willing to try again,” he complained in January 1874, but with insufficient enrolments the Council closed the school...

At least some of William’s contemporaries thought him crazy. Parkes, for example, in his blunt directive to the Inspector General of Police wrote “I think this man is mad but you may as well see what he means.” School inspector McIntyre, in his recommendation that William be appointed to Runnymede, added “I do so with great reluctance, because I am of opinion he suffers from aberration of intellect,” and he was later reported as remarking, to William’s great distress, “Mr. Campbell is a madman, & nobody would give him any kind of employment but madmen!”‘

Campbell’s poetry has been described as ‘well crafted’, but he is not ranked highly among Australia’s poets. Here’s an example of one piece with a local subject:

NIGHT SCENE IN EUROBODALLA.

Eurobodalla! euphoniously named,
Why are thy flora and fauna unfamed?
Wherefore in silence still reigning among
Charms that but wait for a wooer of song?
Wild is the westwind and wilder the weird
Flutter of leaflets where wild men were speared;
Murmuring voices too, seem to bemoan
The midnight disturber in language unknown;
Or are the sounds simply intoned by the breeze
Brushing its way through the native oak trees?
Who were the many that moulder beneath
Mounds now encumbered with mazes of heath?
Fled are their spirits from mortals – but where?
Point with the finger, who can, and say, there!
Secrets, enwombed in the ages to come
Leave all our boasted philosophy dumb!
If there be spectre-like visitants seen
Where aboriginal battles have been,
Oh! that they would to my vision unfold
What through the cloud-rifts saw Ossian of old!
(Ossian: Gaelic ballads)
This is the field where dark warriors encamped,
Stolid self-will on each visage enstamped;
Here, where their forefathers quietly slept,
They fought and they feasted, they laughed and they wept
Sweetly the wattle trees shed their perfume

Over old mysteries mantled in gloom:
Wherefore attempt to unveil them? ‘Tis knaves
Only who gloat o’er the opening of graves!
I am no pansophist: nor would I seem
(pansophist: someone possessing universal knowledge)
More than I am in my own mystic dream.
Thread we our way through the thickets to gain
Glimpses enchanting of moonlight’s domain.
With visions of beauty our senses are fraught
Ever expanding and filling with thought!
Cottage-lights beaming from regions around –
Tell where the settlers’ new clearings abound –
Culture of soils is extending across
Valleys enrich’d by the teeming Tuross.
Sweetest of scenes, as if meant to allure
Waters so peacefully flowing and pure,–
Carpets of verdure, as if to sustain
The brightest and best – yet must I with pain
Tell of dark spots on the picture? Oh can
Blots from my pen fall alone upon man?
Party strife rages – profanities roll
Where but love’s image should shine in the soul!
Fierce animosities often enflame
Neighbours who neighbours are only in name!
Wherefore do nominal Christians surpass
Heathens in heathenish feelings? Alas!
Eurobodalla! To mourn o’er the change
The white man has wrought – is as painful as strange;
But ere he distracted thy beautiful dream,
Savages knew of no God to blaspheme!
August, 1870. W. M. C. C.
in Australian Town & Country Journal, 20.8.1870

Sources: Wikipedia; ‘William Martin Leggett: The “Bard of New Brunswick” in Australia’ by Chris Vening, in Script & Print, available at www.mdhs.org.au/pdfs/Campbell.pdf (supplied, with many thanks, by Wendy Simes of Moruya and District Historical Society)