Charles Thomas Dunlop
Charles was born on March 21st, 1884. He died at the age of 93 on November 16th, 1977.
- Death Notes
- Born Gordon (09811)
Died Granville, NSW
Buried Rookwood Lawn Cemetery
MEMORIES OF CHARLES THOMAS DUNLOP
Memories of C.T.D.I, eldest son of Thomas. W. Dunlop mining engineer, eldest son of John Dunlop and wife (nee Hailey) of Ayre Scotland and North Ireland, finder of Ballarat first gold. C.T.D. born in Gordon Victoria, March 21st 1884.
Part 1
I was about 3 years old when I first remember living at Old Chum Hill at Bendigo. My father was the engineer of the Old Chum mine on the crown of the hill. The house was a two residence building with a long wide veranda divided by a common wall, each of which had four or five rooms. The yard at rear was rather spacious with a fence separating each yard. A tool and wood shed was also divided for each yard. There was a row of flowering gums on the east side. It was the only building on that side of the hill between Barnard Street and Montgomery Road ???. Looking east from our house Lilley Street ran up the valley along side the railway line which separated us from the water course. This gully in turn divided the streets running east and west and we had a view straight up Nettle Street onto the Violet Street state school. The house on the bend of Nettle Street was the residence of Mr. David Clarke who was then an engineer in charge of the Garibaldi Gold Nine. Afterwards he asked my father to take over his job as he wanted to go to England. This my father did. They had at Garibaldi a new first motion link engine driving an air compressor and a battery engine driving a thirty head stamper crushing the ore from the mine.
When David Clarke returned from England he got a position selling air rock drills and other machinery for Taylor Horsefield who had started making drills at Long Gully near Eaglehawk. I was about four years old then. Dave Clarke had a buggy and horse to go selling these rock drills to the mines and often took me to accompany him. He was a very friendly man and he took a great interest in me. However, he was not long with Taylor Horsefield's when the Vacuum Oil Company advertised for a man to sell to the mines a new gadget called a site drop lubricator to use their new lubricating oil. Clarke took that job which fitted in well with what he was doing. The lubricator was a great success from the start. By tapping the steam on the intake the condensing steam forced a drop of oil at a time to lubricate the engine. Previously they had depended on a cup secured to the top of the engine cylinder the heat melting the mutton fat which dripped into the engine but needed constant attention. I went with David Clarke on this job, we took our lunch and he used to buy soft drinks. He seemed very proud of me being with him and I often went into the mine engine house while he instructed the fitting of the lubricator and how to work it.
This ended when I was old enough in my fifth year to go to Violet Street school which was only about three blocks away. I went down over the hill across Lilley Street to the end of Nettle Street. It was close enough to come home for midday lunch which lasted one and a half hours at that time. On my way home I would meet a Mr Abram, he lived in Nettle Street and was governor of mines in Bendigo. He used to ride a bicycle to travel around. I was big and very fat for my age and Mr Abram had a good sense of humour. He would get off his bike at one of the cross streets and put me on his bike telling me how ill I looked and didn't my mother feed me enough. I then thought she must have been starving me. When we reached his gate he put me down and told me to tell my mother what he had said. I had been crying on the way home and burst in saying Mr Abram said I was starving and to give me plenty to eat or I might die of starvation.
My sister Addie and I had plenty of playmates, our neighbour Arthur Sculley and Mrs Dyson's children and Florrie Clarke. Mrs Dyson lived near our place on a path that led around the south end of Old Chum Hill. Mr Dyson was an accountant and secretary to a Mr Lansell, who at that time was a very rich man with his office and residence near one of his private mines called the Two Twenty. Mr Dyson always looked very important and very well dressed, mostly wearing a pith helmet. Mr Lansell had made his home very attractive amongst the various sand dumps from the big stamp battery and mine mullock heaps. People used to come from miles around to look at the stately home called Fortuna. Looking along the line of the reef there was a poppet head every few hundred yards in those days.
Shortly after I started school we shifted to Monument Hill to live at Olive Street so my father was close to his then work. We had a good brick home rented to us by a little hunch-back called Miss Nicholas. It had large grounds with lots of fruit trees and grape vines. There were two plums, two figs, one quince, four apples, four oranges and two almond trees. We were very happy. Three of my brothers and one sister were born there. My mother's youngest brother came to stay with us and father got him a job mining at Garibaldi. He changed that job after he had been drinking and was put on the mat, the mine manager telling him off. He went to work at the Great Extended Hustlers Mine, but he was not long there. He and his mate had an accident after drilling the holes to block the quartz reef out. While charging one of the holes with dynamite with a ram-rod it discharged and our uncle Charlie was badly injured taking most of the force on his face and right arm. They took him to the hospital in a very bad state. After a long time they pulled him around and when discharged was completely blind and his hand and arm were badly knocked about. He lived mostly with us but spent some time with his other sister Ellen, at Meredith.
During this time my father commenced to study at the Bendigo School of Mines to gain a Mining Manager and Mining Engineer Certificate. He was five to six years in his spare time studying chemistry, assaying and geology. He passed with an Honours certificate.
It was about this time the great land boom burst in Victoria which was early in the 1890's. His only brother Alexander lived with his mother and used to contract for the council mostly pitcher setting kerb and gutter and footpaths (pitchers are bluestone blocks that were used for kerbing etc). However when the boom burst he lost some valuable property and was in a bad way with no work available in Melbourne. He came to live with us with his mother. Father and Uncle Alex commenced business buying used copper plates that had gold in a small way attached to them. They processed them and recovered the gold. The sand and water from the batteries ran over them on a downward path to the dumps. Also magnet iron, old retorts and various other things were processed when gold could be recovered. Uncle Alex used to travel round and buy up. They had a burden pan and other ways of treating these to secure gold. They used to clean the copper plates for a fee by a special process. My father used to fire and treat the scale with acid which would reduce the mass to pure gold. They made a good living with this work until a South African named Crobb, a lecturer appointed to the Bendigo School of Mines, made friends with my father. Father was still keenly interested in the School of Mines and they would talk over a scheme of how to treat the residue tailings from the batteries with cyanide. He told him how they were experimenting with it in South Africa at Johannesburg. They went round to take samples from various sand dumps and took it to the School of Mines to be assayed. Some samples showed from three to five dwts. of gold per ton of sand.
My father set up a huge vat in our yard an erected a paling shed over it and experimented for quite a while. There were properties in the Bendigo sand like a trace of antimony, which he said was destroying the cyanide before it dissolved the gold and gave it the appearance of what he called Prussian blue. After a good while trying new chemicals, father claimed he overcame that difficulty and extracted the gold in liquid form which was deposited on zinc shavings then treated and the gold recovered.
They then secured a block of land at Sparrowhawk, about three acres, close to the water race that brought the city water supply. Uncle Alex, when in Melbourne had much to do with stone mason work, so decided they would build big stone vats. Uncle set to work to quarry the stone at a nearby hill and he built with some help 8, 10 and 12 feet vats in 24 section units with a big stone room. They made an elaborate system of filters filled with zinc shavings. The liquid gold from the vats passed through it and was recovered from the filters. As cyanide is so deadly poisonous the area had to be securely fenced by a six foot paling fence. The liquid was then pumped back to the vats. The tailings sand had to be bought from a mining company and had to be carted about a mile to the works. They let a contract to a man with several tip trays to do this. This took a good while to get in order using the cyanide solution to use the gold and deposit on the zinc shavings. However, when the sand at this dump was used, it was found to have a lot more of the elements that destroyed the cyanide making the prussian blue that they had found in their experiments at home. They got permission from the Water Board to use water from the race above the works to sluice the sand in a wooden race before putting it in the vats which meant a lot of extra handling apart from the labour expense. But it was found that a lot of the fine sand carrying the gold was being carried down the drain into Sparrowhawk Creek. By this time the funds were drying up. There were five of us children and uncle and grandma to keep. After a period together and what was spent on material my father lost heart. Mr. Crabb had gone back to Africa although some of his friends like Dave Clarke, Ben Rogers and George Robinson offered to buy in he said he was not going on for others to get the benefit of his studying so he let the place be sold up and paid off his debts. A duck farmer turned the place into a poultry farm.
Father took a job back as an engineer at the old Chum Nine where he first worked in Bendigo. The old Chum had a problem with the winding engine, a big loose eccentric engine that would not pull the cage away loaded from the bottom of the shaft without jerking the wire rope against the side of the shaft and some of the dividing timber had to be repaired quite often. Father told the management that he could make it pull away steady if they would allow him to work over a weekend and cut the travel back in the main shaft of the engine. It meant cutting with a cold chisel a portion of metal 1 1/2" x 2" x 1 1/4" deep that would give more travel to the slide valve allowing the steam pressure full access to the cylinder that he claimed it did not have. Some of the engineering firms thought the idea foolish. However, he got the manager to agree when father was so pressing with his claim. The result was a great success. The cage came away steadily and firm without any jerk of the rope. News of this got about and father was sought after for problems in several mines.
Uncle Alex took the management of the forty stamp battery at the Great Extended Hustlers Mine. The battery was very much run down. Uncle reorganised it with new gear and recovered gold from lots of old copper plates and other scrap things to pay for the extra labour and material he needed. The directors and management of the company greatly appreciated what he did and gave him a handsome present when the half-yearly report came out. Uncle however, was never happy working for anyone for wages and after a few years was always telling us about his dream of a gold reef at Elaine where he and my father were reared. He resigned from his battery managers job on good money for those days and set off taking me with him in early 1898, I being then fourteen years old. While all the foregoing was happening we were a happy little family together and had very good neighbours. We had been going to the Violet Street State school when Uncle and Grandma came to live with us. Grandma was a staunch Irish Roman Catholic and insisted we be sent to the Marist Brothers school, that is Ron, my younger brother and I. My sister Addie went to the Nun's Day School. We were very happy at Violet Street school. Played ball games and football. I was captain of our junior clan and played against Ironbark and Carry Hill. We generally played well with Herbert Hodge, Ridley Goldsworth and the Duffy boys. The Duffy's had the bakery business at Ironbark. They both changed to the Catholic school about the same time as we did with Dick Morris who was afterwards the Union Secretary and ended the Director of the Commonwealth Bank. Carl Jess, whose people had a paint business near the Garden Gully Mine at Ironbark was also in my class at Violet Street. His mother was a Catholic but he didn't leave the state school. His mother asked me to take him to Sunday School after the 9.15 Mass. He went only a few times and on leaving school went to the military college at Queenscliff. Through the first world war he finished as General Jess and organised the then Prince of Wales visit to Victoria. His son whom I have not met is an M.P. representing one of the electorates in Canberra.
I did not like changing school much, but Grandma contacted a Catholic family, there name was Bertie. They were Italians with two sons who had been at the Marist Brothers school. They sent me with Leo and his brother who we got to know as "Big-head Bertie". The Hybernian Hall where the school was held near the Catholic Church was on the other side of Bendigo on the east, while Monument Hill was on the west side in the mining quarter. We had to walk right through Bendigo along Pall Mall. We sometimes took a route through the park. It was during this time in Pall Mall that Myers opened a big rag shop, I remember it well, buying items for my mother like teatowels and school stockings. After a while Sid Myers anounced a special closing down sale to clear sale to clear stock. It was a huge success. He got so well known for bargains he set to restocking and never looked back.
Continued below
Charles Thomas Dunlop & Winifred Merle Victoria Buckland 
Winifred Merle Victoria Buckland
