Wentworth: A Life in Two Parts

My grandfather vanished. He walked out of his house in Madras one day and was never seen again. Someone said he was seen getting into a carriage with a young woman. Others thought he might have been mugged and murdered. My mother thought he had PTSD from a yachting accident. My grandmother engaged private detectives and even reported his disappearance to Scotland Yard but no trace of him was found. After years of trying to find him my grandmother reluctantly came to the view that he would never be found and was probably dead.

He was not dead. He had gone to Australia where he had ‘re-married’. He continued living in Australia for 22 years until his death in 1947, never making contact with his first wife or the children he left behind in India. I was only able to discover what had happened to him by consulting online records, a resource that was never available to my grandmother. They showed that he had left India for England, then migrated to Australia, settling in New South Wales, where he lived until his death. He had made a clean break with his past, so much so that his life became a life in two parts, his former life with family and children in India, and a second life in Australia. These notes set out what I have discovered so far about both lives. It is a work in progress and represents what is known as of July 2024. I am sure that there will be more to discover.

Wentworth in India

William Wentworth Robinson was born in Krishnagar, India, in 1877, the eldest of three children to William Henry Robinson and Elizabeth Dillon. William Henry Robinson had gone to India in the 1860s to work on the railways and Elizabeth had gone to India as a young child but lost both parents during the 1857 Mutiny.

Wentworth married my grandmother, Lilian May Burbidge, in 1901.1 At the time of their marriage, Wentworth was an Assistant Dock Superintendent at Kidderpore. The docks were a relatively new addition to the port of Calcutta and Wentworth’s job there must have offered good prospects for future advancement, which is probably why Lilian was to express frustration when he lost his job a few years later.

Wentworth’s first son, Maurice Wentworth Burbidge Robinson, was born in Calcutta in 1902. My father, Denis Harry Robinson, was his second son but was born in England, in 1903. Lilian gave birth to her first daughter, Phyllis Elizabeth Robinson, two years later in Calcutta.

Wentworth left the family for the first time after the birth of Phyllis. I was unaware of this first separation until I recently saw a letter that Lilian had written to her niece in the 1970s, where she spoke about it briefly and with barely concealed bitterness.

‘Wentworth lost his good job in Chittagong & cleared the country leaving me & the young children dependent on my family. When he came to his senses he was lucky to get a poorly paid post in Madras.’2

It is probable that Maurice and Denis, then still infants, were with Lilian’s parents in London at the time and she looked after her baby daughter Phyllis on her own in India. Maurice and Denis spent their early years in England and went to school together in Somerset.

Lilian’s reference to Wentworth having ‘cleared the country’ is ambiguous because she may have been referring either to him leaving India or simply leaving Bengal, where they lived. Her correspondence does not reveal why he left, but we are left to speculate that there may have been another woman with her observation that he later ‘came to his senses.’

The separation was relatively short-lived as they were back together by 1909 when Lilian gave birth to twins, Terrence Noel Dillon Robinson and Joan Gertrude Laurice Robinson, on Christmas Day that year (presumably prompting the name Noel for one of them!). The twins did not do well after birth and died in Madras on 13 January 1910, shortly after their christening.

There was to be one more child to the marriage, Brian Rory Robinson, who was born in 1911 a year after the death of the twins. According to my mother, Lilian also had stillborn triplets, but I can find no evidence of this fact in Lilian’s papers or in the online records.

Wentworth left the marriage for the second time about twelve years after Brian’s birth. There is no precise date for this second departure, but it was certainly after the death of Wentworth’s mother in 1921 because Lilian wrote in a letter to Betty Lazard ‘Thank God she was spared from knowing that once more he had deserted us.’

Wentworth was a keen yachtsman and our family has several cups he won for sailing at the Madras Yacht Club, the latest one dated 1923, so he probably left after that year and before he turned up in Australia in 1925.

My mother told me that Wentworth was involved in a yachting tragedy while sailing off Madras. She said his yacht had overturned and he and two others were left hanging onto the hull of the upturned boat waiting for help to arrive. After waiting for several hours, one of his friends set out to swim ashore but was never seen again, while Wentworth and the remaining person waited for two days until they were found and rescued.

It was said that Wentworth never got over the tragedy, particularly the death of his friend, and this may have contributed to his later disappearance. My father never spoke to me of Wentworth and neither did my grandmother, even though we were in communication for many years. His disappearance became a family secret, spoken of rarely and with an air of mystery. There were whispers that he had met with foul play, perhaps because of an illicit affair or uncleared gambling debts, and the ‘girl in the carriage’ rumour brought a certain salacious air to it all. The possibility that he had ‘gone off his head’ after the yachting accident was also canvassed and even brought some sympathy, but not forgiveness. The general view was that he was a selfish cad who had abandoned his wife and family.

I searched on and off for some trace of Wentworth in the various online genealogical databases for many years, but nothing turned up until, by chance, I searched the online Australian marriage documents in 2014 and found a record of his marriage to another woman in 1927. This led to the discovery of other documents, including evidence of his journey to Australia. I also found traces of his movements in the Australian electoral rolls and online newspapers of the period and, after piecing together his movements, I was able to speak to relatives of his second wife and also to a staff member of the firm that carried out his funeral in New South Wales. More evidence may come to light now that it is confirmed that he came to Australia, but with the information we now have it’s possible to construct a rough outline of his movements in the period after he left my grandmother.

Wentworth in Australia

Wentworth sailed from England on the Jervis Bay on 24 February 1925, arriving in Fremantle on 27 March  of that year.3 The ship was then owned by the Australian Commonwealth Line, bringing immigrants to Australia from the UK. Wentworth apparently travelled alone as there are no other passengers listed with him or from the same address in London, so if he had left Lilian for another woman it would appear that the relationship was over by the time he emigrated.

The passenger manifest identifies Wentworth’s occupation as ‘company secretary’ and gave an address in London as 123 Sutherland Avenue, Maida Vale W9. Both of his sisters were living in London at the time so it is possible that Wentworth made contact with one or both of them. Nothing seems to have been said to Lilian, however, and she apparently remained ignorant of his move to England and, presumably, his subsequent journey to Australia.

It is unclear why Wentworth chose to go to Western Australia. Perhaps he had a contact there or had been told of a job prospect, but it is impossible to know as he left no trace of his stay, or at least none that I have been able to find.

Wentworth stayed in Perth for a little over a year before he boarded a coastal ship, the Minderoo, for Carnarvon. The town, then with a population of only about 3,000 people, was not a tourist resort or the kind of place that one would choose to visit unless for a specific job. Most of the jobs in town were involved with servicing the inland sheep stations, or with the small pearling industry. Some work would have existed at the port itself, which catered for ships travelling between Perth and northern ports, so it is possible that this is what brought Wentworth there given his experience on the docks in Calcutta. He is not mentioned in the local newspaper, which I have searched, or in any of the local histories and whatever brought him to the town has left no mark.

I have searched the online Births, Deaths and Marriages indexes for both the UK and India for the 1920s, but could find no mention of a divorce between Wentworth and Lilian. Indeed, nothing I ever heard growing up, or have seen in Lilian’s letters, would indicate that they did divorce. There is no evidence of any proceedings in either country and I think it highly likely that they were still legally married when Wentworth went to Australia. Any marriage that Wentworth subsequently entered into would therefore have been bigamous.

Wentworth went through a form of marriage with a woman I will name only as ‘Catherine’ to preserve he anonymity. Catherine died before I found out about the marriage so I was never able to talk to her about it, but I did speak to a family member who seemed to be totally unaware that ‘Robbie’, as the family came to know him, was already married.4

It seems certain that Wentworth married Catherine knowing that he was still lawfully married to Lilian and that, by going through another form of marriage, he was committing bigamy and could be charged with a criminal offence.5 The remoteness of Carnarvon and the difficulty of cross-checking records in those days may have emboldened him to take the risk and indeed may have been the reason why he went all the way to Carnarvon to marry. It also meant that there was no turning back after the event because he must have known that if he ever tried to contact Lilian and his children again his crime would be exposed.

Wentworth and Catherine did not stay in Carnarvon very long and by 1930 they were living in New South Wales, where they appeared on the electoral roll for Parramatta. Wentworth was described as a salesman and Catherine as a dressmaker. They were still on the roll in 1933, at the same address and with the same occupations. By 1934 they had moved to a new address – 24 Handley Avenue, Thornleigh – with Wentworth now listed as a ‘flower grower’ and Catherine as ‘home duties’.

Catherine disappeared from the New South Wales rolls after 1934 and in 1939 she appeared by herself on the electoral roll in North Perth, back in Western Australia. She seems to have then remained in Western Australia while Wentworth stayed on his own in Sydney.

Why did Wentworth and Catherine end up living apart? Perhaps she found out that he was already married and that she was in a bigamous marriage. Perhaps they just fell out of love. Something triggered a crisis in Wentworth’s life, however, and in 1938 a Sydney newspaper story reported that he had tried to shoot himself.6 He survived the attempt but ended up in Mt. St Joseph’s Home in Young, New South Wales. He died there four years later.7

Wentworth is buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery in Young, but his grave is unmarked. I have spoken to the person in charge of the cemetery records at the Young Shire Council and she could find no trace of him. The company handling his funeral, Patterson Bros, have confirmed that they managed his burial and that he was in the Young cemetery, but they have not retained a written record of the gravesite. It is possible that he had a pauper’s funeral and lies in an unmarked grave.

The mystery of Wentworth’s disappearance has been solved in part. We now know where he went and, in broad terms, what he did. The biggest milestone in his life-after-Lilian was his marriage to Catherine in 1927, a marriage which effectively prevented any contact with my grandmother or his children as it would have revealed his bigamy and put him in danger of imprisonment. The rest of his life, which must have been quite challenging in Australia during and after the Depression, was spent in complete isolation from his family and friends. We will never know whether he had any regrets about his conduct or whether he was happy with Catherine and the new life he created. He and Catherine had no children of their own.

The final years of Wentworth’s life must have been sad as he was not only separated from his family but also from Catherine. He was likely to have been in poor health and feeling physically and emotionally alone.

We arrived in Perth in 1948, a year after Wentworth’s death. Coincidentally, one of the first houses we lived in was only two houses from where Catherine had lived with her parents before she met Wentworth. Catherine and Wentworth had separated and she had returned to Perth by the time we arrived. In the latter part of her life she lived only 10 minutes away from where I now live with my family. If only we had known what we know now, we might have met and filled in some of the remaining gaps.

Lilian remained in India for ten years after Wentworth’s disappearance. She must have believed that he had died because she described herself as a widow on the passenger list of the ship that took her to England in 1934.  When I met her for the first time in 1972 she was in her nineties and then living in an aged persons house in Sydenham. She died in 1978, just six months before her 100th birthday.

  1. Marriage of William Wentworth Robinson and Lilian Burbidge, married 12 January 1901, Kidderpore [Kidderpur], India, in British India Office Marriages, Parish register transcripts from the Presidency of Bengal, 1713-1948, N-1-288, 234, Findmypast.co.uk, accessed 27 July 2024. ↩︎
  2. Lillian Robinson to Betty Lazard [letter], 4 October 1974, original held by Hilary Lazard, France. ↩︎
  3. Passenger list entry for William W Robinson, Jervis Bay, arriving Fremantle 28 March 1925, Ancestry.com, accessed 23 July 2024. ↩︎
  4. Marriage of William Wentworth Robinson and [‘Catherine’], married 22 October 1927, Carnarvon, Western Australia, in Australia, Marriages, 1788-1935, Findmypast.co.uk, accessed 27 July 2024. ↩︎
  5. Criminal Code Compilation Act 1913 (WA) s 339. ↩︎
  6. ‘Man Found with Bullet in Head’, Sun (Sydney, NSW), 17 October 1938, p 1. ↩︎
  7. Death certificate of William Wentworth Robinson, died 11 July 1947, New South Wales, Reg No 1947/021840, certified copy in the possession of the author. ↩︎