The newlyweds felt the weight of disapproval. Added to that, was the lure of gold in far off Victoria. Within weeks of the marriage, they set out for Victoria. With them went William’s brothers Thomas and Joseph Hope Hodgetts, who hoped to return to England “if not rich, at least with something to keep [him] comfortable.”
If Elizabeth had disapproved of Thomas and William’s marriages, imagine what she thought of them leading their younger brother off to Australia! As a widow who had already lost one son, she must have been distraught. Would she ever see them again?
On 21 August 1852, the three Hodgetts brothers and the new Mrs William Hodgetts sailed on the SS Great Britain.
The ship had been launched nine years earlier to glowing praise on her immense size, technology, and passenger facilities. The first ocean-going steamship to use screw propulsion, she was a symbol of the modern age.
The Hodgetts party was joining her inaugural voyage to Australia. She would be one of the first steamships to cross the globe. When the SS Great Britain sailed from Liverpool on 21 August 1852, tens of thousands lined the Mersey to watch the great ship pass and other ships dipped their colours to her.
Of the 639 passengers, almost half were in steerage. The Hodgetts party were in the Fore Saloon with a mixture of gentlemen, clerks, and men of commerce. Maria was one of only 86 women on board and had a state room.
On board was Edward Towle who kept a journal of the voyage. His cabinmates included his brother and two Hodgetts brothers who he wrote “appear to be very civil and obliging, equipped for the diggings with every requisite excepting one which is the habit of bodily labour.” Towle soon pronounced Joseph “amusing and a bit of a genius” and became his constant companion. He also said there was a third brother in another cabin who was very clever.
Maddeningly, Edward Towle never mentions Thomas by name and created some ambiguity over which brother was the second Hodgetts in his cabin. Presumably, Thomas was there, and William was in the state room with Maria.
The glamour of the ship was balanced by the irritant of smoke and dirt from the funnels. In addition, every corner of the deck was littered with sacks of coal to fuel the ship until Cape Town where supplies would be taken on. In the first few days, the two Hodgetts brothers suffered from seasickness and had to clamber over these sacks to reach the ship’s sides; they called this “being hauled over the coals”.
The marketing had implied ship luxuries were available to all, but many Fore Saloon passengers were disappointed in the accommodation, meals, and number of stewards. When they divided into two messes to manage mealtimes more efficiently, Joseph was with the Towles. It is unclear whether William, Maria and Thomas were in the other mess or among the Fore Saloon passengers who paid extra to dine in the After Saloon where meals were compared to those of the great hotels.
On September 14, Edward Towle wrote:
“I am forming the party for the diggings. It will consist I expect of Ben and I, Joe and William Hodgetts and another very quiet young fellow who is strong and active. We shall have a tent and cooking apparatus…William Hodgetts has been in the medical profession and will take the requisite for Dysentery and Ophthalmia [eye inflammation]. He is married I think rather beneath his station, but this will be rather an advantage for the young woman will not be afraid to rough it as we shall be obliged to do, and she will prove invaluable in cooking our meals.”
After four weeks of sailing, the ship had to double back to St Helena for coal as the shipping line had underestimated the amount required. Some passengers were irate as they had chosen the ship to reach Victoria quickly. However, after a stormy passage, the safe arrival at Jamestown Harbour was a relief. That evening, the captain joined Joseph’s mess for dinner “ordering champagne to be served and good naturedly describing them as ‘the noisiest set of beggars he [had] ever met in his life’.”
St Helena couldn’t supply enough coal, so the visit extended to a week while several hundred tons of firewood were chopped to make up the shortfall. The unplanned stop proved welcome. Some passengers took up residence in the hotel and Joe saw the sights including Napoleon’s tomb. He and his messmates placed an “All’s well” notice in the ship’s newspaper and posted it home as this was cheaper than posting a letter. While Joe played cricket against the officers of the local garrison, Edward Towle explored the island and returned just in time for the ship to sail. He and Joe were joyfully reunited and vowed no such expedition would part them again.
On the voyage from St Helena to Cape Town, William was reported as sometimes playing whist from one mealtime to the next while his young good-looking wife sat watching him patiently. Meanwhile, a passenger was accused of stealing meat and the captain presided over a trial with a jury of passengers and Thomas Hodgetts as defence lawyer. The man was found to have stolen the meat as a joke “whilst in a state of beer”.
There was a passenger named Battersea who was drunk so often that his cabinmates threw him out and he slept in a passage each night. One night in October, Towle jokingly suggested he sleep in the bunk of George Maunsell, another of Towle’s cabinmates. When Maunsell later climbed into his bunk and found it occupied, a loud tussle ensued in which both Battersea and Maunsell were tugged in and out of the cabin.* William took a prominent part in this horseplay which roused the whole of the Fore Saloon. As Maunsell was Irish, several of his countrymen chose to take it as a national insult. Irish honour was only appeased by William assuring Maunsell that it was all a joke.
The coast of Australia was sighted on the morning of November 11 and passengers gazed at this land of hope. Around seven in the evening they reached Point Lonsdale lighthouse and a pilot rowed out to guide them into Port Phillip. This was one of the most treacherous stretches of water in the world as attested by a half-submerged shipwreck lying at the entrance. Safely through the Heads, passengers were greeted by another sobering sight: the Ticonderoga which had left Liverpool two weeks before them was now quarantined on the beach to the right, having lost over 100 passengers to Typhus.
The SS Great Britain anchored for the night and sailed into Hobsons Bay the following morning. Getting ashore was no easy matter. 15,000 people arrived that fortnight, there was no wharf, and there weren’t enough small boats to ferry them upriver to Melbourne. They had to wait on tugs, wrestling their luggage aboard themselves. It was a hot day, and they were plagued by flies and mosquitoes—Welcome to Australia!
Sources & Notes
- Great Britain Victoria, Australia, Assisted and Unassisted Passenger Lists, Ancestry
- Edward Towle’s Great Britain journal and letters 4/10/1852 and 11/11/1852 (Australian Joint Copying Project. & National Library of Australia. & State Library of New South Wales. & SS Great Britain Project. & Great Britain (Ship). ([19–]). SS Great Britain archives concerning Australian voyages : [M2346-2347]. ) NLA, retrieved 18/9/2025. Transcript here. Also plus letter from Stephen (Barton?) 8/10/1852. Transcript here.
- Claire Connor, Passengers, Emigrants and Modern Men: a social history of the 1852 voyage of SS Great Britain from Liverpool to Melb, (PhD thesis, University of Bristol, 2014); Note Connor incorrectly identified William as a medical student referred to in Association Medical Journal London 9/9/1853, Vol 1. No 36 edition pp787-88. Northampton Mercury 10/9/1853 reveals that while some of the details match, the student in question departed England two months before William, arrived in Melb Sept 1852 (before William), and trained at Grey’s (William was apprenticed in Birmingham), and the letters were submitted by the medical student’s father (William’s father was dead).
- St Helena Advocate excerpt Brunel’s SS Great Britain Facebook post 8/2/2021, Retrieved 5/5/2021
- Geoffrey Blainey, Black Kettle and Full Moon, Penguin, 2003, p105-6 (mailing newspapers).
- ‘Famous Visitors, St Helena Island’, Retrieved 3/5/2021.
- Arrival Seweryn Korzelinksi (translated by Stanley Robe) Memoirs of Gold-Digging in Australia, 1979, p1-4, Towle letter 8/12/1852 and undated letter re Creswick diggings