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also looks like a Honeycombe, as do some of his descendants; and he was given two names
that seem to indicate he was named after his grandfather (William) and his father (John) - a
common practise that century. William's first son, William Robert, had also been christened
thus.
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The fact that Mary Casey was five months pregnant when she married John on 14 July 1881
might also indicate that they had had an association of at least a year and that he was
responsible for William John.
Mary Casey was Irish. She was dark-haired, blue-eyed and just over five feet tall. She was not,
however, 23, as she claimed to be when she married John. She was almost 29. John was 39 the
month before. Mary's history will be detailed later. Suffice it now to say that her parents came
from Ireland, that she was born in Lancashire in 1853 and voyaged with her parents to Australia
when she was one year old. In her marriage certificate, as on others, she would say she was
born in Tasmania. Not so. But it is possible that she lived there as a child, or as a girl. It is even
possible that she married there in 1871. More of that later. But that possibility is quite strong.
Mary was a Roman Catholic. But the wedding in Charters Towers took place in an Anglican
church, St Paul's, a wooden edifice in Mosman Street, erected a few years earlier - not in the
Catholic church, which had just been resited and rebuilt. Was this because Mary was visibly
pregnant, or because John refused to enter a Catholic church?
It can't have been a happy affair or well attended. The pregnant bride already had an illegitimate
son and may have been married before. The bridegroom, who thought his bride was 23, was
somewhat older than her and no longer flushed with youth.
What led them to marry? What led Mary to Charters Towers? How did they meet? We only
know that they lived on St Patrick's Block for the next three years, until 1884, during which time
two baby boys were born to John and Mary Honeycombe, brothers for little William John, who
was known as Willie (though later as Bill).
The first of these infants was christened as Francis Horace (Frank). He was born in October
1881, a bad year in the community for cholera and typhus, which the Honeycombe family safely
survived.
Then an event occurred that would affect everyone in the Towers in some way for evermore,
and mark the lives, and deaths, of John and Mary's children. To general rejoicing, the railway-
line from Townsville reached Charters Towers in 1882.
Also in that year, in October, a gold-mining lease (No 358) was taken out on 6 acres of land in
the Towers known as Harry's Paddock by a group of 12 men, headed by John Rutherford and
John Honeycombe. Four of the group got rid of their shares within a few months. But whether
John's investment made any profit we do not know.
His next son, Robert Henry (Bob) was born in August 1883, soon after the telegraph line
reached Charters Towers. Bob would be the first of the Queensland Honeycombes to work on
the railways, and the second to be carried home dead on a train.
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It was in this year (1883) that a young Irish woman called Daisy May O'Dwyer came to
Queensland and Charters Towers, perhaps by train. She was 23 and obtained employment on a
grazing property called Fanning Downs, where she met an English stockman and daredevil rider
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