 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
country. This is the new."'
The Micawbers saiied from Gravesend on the River Thames. The port of departure for the
Honeycombes was Plymouth.
Why Plymouth? London and Liverpool were the busiest ports of emigration - over 130,000
sailed from Liverpool in 1848, mainly to the USA and Canada. But Plymouth sailings were
mainly to Australia. Of 130 emigrant ships that left Plymouth in 1849, 109 were Australia-
bound.
Besides, as we have seen, Plymouth had been West Country people's point of departure for
Australia for nearly 200 years, and any family leaving England would want to spend their last
weeks and days ashore near their stay-at-home relations and the villages of their birth and
ancestral life.
It is quite possible, however, that William's choice of Plymouth as the port of embarkation was
not a choice as such, but because he was already there.
His last known address is in Dove Street in Bristol in 1847. Perhaps he then moved south,
seeking employment in Exeter or Plymouth, where much civic construction and development
were taking place, especially in Plymouth, which was joined to London by rail (via Exeter) in
April 1849. Steam trains, apart from their exciting novelty, were a huge boost to trade and the
movement of workers between cities and towns. London was now much more accessible, a
mere six hours away.
Plymouth itself had achieved no national importance until it became the principal naval base in
Elizabeth I's war with Spain. This was largeiy due to two local boys who'd made good: Sir
Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins, who was comptroller and then treasurer of the navy.
Drake sailed from Plymouth in July
1588 to attack and defeat the Spanish Armada. Because of wars against the French a hundred
years later, a new navai base was established at Dock on the River Tamar, west of Plymouth,
by 1696, Dock expanded so quickly that at one time its population exceeded that of Plymouth;
its name was changed to Devonport in 1824, A mile-iong breakwater in Plymouth Sound,
completed by 1841, provided shipping with one of the largest and safest harbours in the British
Isles,
If William Honeycombe and his family came to Plymouth from Bristol in 1847, 1848 or 1849,
he might have been employed as a stonemason in Devonport, where a great fire, in September
1840, had destroyed three ships in dock and several dockyard buildings. If he worked in the
complex of docks and navai buildings - or even in the city - he might have met yet another
Wiiliam Honeycombe, a great-great-grandfather of mine.
This William, a miliwright and then a dockyard sawyer, was born in Liskeard in Cornwall in
1786, not far from Calstock and St Cleer. He was consequently 63 in 1849 and more than ten
years older than Wiiliam the stonemason. Wiiliam the sawyer continued to work in the
dockyard, receiving about 1/6d a day, until 1855, when he was 69. He and his wife, Dorothy,
whom he married in Stoke Damerei in Plymouth in 1811, had produced ten children, of whom
five had survived. Of the girls, Mary Ann, the eldest, had married a shoemaker; Margaretta was
unmarried and probably in service; the third daughter, Ann Maria, had three illegitimate children
- the first by a soldier, it seems; the last by her brother-in-law.
Of the two surviving boys, the eldest, William Henry, born in 1816, was a dockyard sawyer like
his father and, though married, had no children. The youngest in the family was my great-
 |