1. Edward Latham in Australia
Edward Latham and his older brother Thomas, formerly of Belle Vale Farm, Gateacre, arrived in Melbourne aboard the Solway on 30 January 1863. Thomas died the following day. From these inauspicious beginnings in the new colony of Victoria Edward Latham went on to become the founder of the now giant Carlton & United Breweries, to become one of the colony’s richest men, to indulge in an extravagant program of building mansions and other construction projects and to undergo a secret bankruptcy following the failure of the Melbourne land boom of the 1880s.
Little is known of Latham’s activities over the next two years except that he appears to have had ample funds and travelled as a gentleman through Victoria and Tasmania. In this time he established some connections with the Victorian seaside village of Queenscliff and may have purchased some property there. On 1 February 1865 Latham married Bertha Ashton, a widow in Hobart. She was 12 years his senior and presumably of some wealth, coming from the Tasmanian upper class. Soon the married couple were back in Melbourne where in the same year, and in partnership with G. Milne, Latham bought the Carlton Brewery.
From this time Latham’s business expanded and grew so rapidly that he was already a wealthy man by 1870 and he embarked on an ambitious building program constructing large and permanent bluestone stables and warehouses for the brewery. At about this time he is reputed to have had constructed the stone mansion in Kew now known as Raheen which, probably because he had financially overreached himself, he sold in 1872. Latham’s last major building project was the mansion Lathamstowe built for the use of Church of England clergy in Queenscliff in 1883. He also appears to have had a strong interest in Baillieu House (later the Ozone Hotel) built next door at the same time.
During the 1880s Latham and family indulged in the ostentatious display of their wealth at balls parties and overseas trips and lived in the mansion Knowsley nearby to Raheen. With his son-in-law, and years later his brother-in-law, William Lawrence Baillieu, Latham speculated in land and other forms of investment on a large scale. The collapse of the boom made Latham and Baillieu both bankrupt and in 1892 they went through a secret form of bankruptcy known as ‘Composition by Arrangement’. Latham’s deficiency was £32,795. By the end of the year Latham & Baillieu had bought the Southern or Richmond Brewery and were back in business.
However the bankruptcy was followed by the death of his wife and son in 1894. Remarried the following year Latham lived quietly in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs at a number of locations. His brewery was taken over by Carlton in 1900 and following his death in 1905 the main asset of his estate was 14,472 part paid Carlton Brewery shares. Three years later Carlton amalgamated with other Melbourne breweries and Carlton & United Breweries, with its famous ‘Fosters Lager’ brand, was established.
2. Edward Latham in Liverpool & Gateacre
Edward Latham was born in Liverpool on 20 July 1839 and Christened at St Peter’s Church Street the same year. He was the youngest of five children with two older brothers, Henry and Thomas. Only a flimsy account of his life in England – a few sentences – has been left by Latham although he did claim descent from the gentleman ‘Latham of Knowsley’ of the fifteenth century. According to Latham he and his brothers were orphaned in 1844 and spent the next ten years at an orphanage or boarding school almost certainly conducted by the Church of England. He then claimed to spend the next ten years of his life working in a large fat rendering mill for soap making before departing for Australia. When I informed Mike Chitty of the Gateacre Society of this piece of information he immediately suggested that this would probably be at the soap making factory in nearby Widnes.
Latham’s account of his early life is both inadequate and mysterious. It certainly does not add up as he was orphaned in 1844 and was in an orphanage boarding school until 1854 and left for Australia on the Solway on 16.10.1862 just after his 23rd birthday. Further in the 1861 census, Edward was residing at the Belle Vale farm of 32 acres and his occupation was listed as ‘commercial clerk’. The other occupants of the farm were his brothers Henry and Thomas and two others. Surprisingly it is the middle brother Thomas who was listed as the ‘farmer’ and the oldest brother Henry was also listed as a ‘commercial clerk’.
What follows is based loosely on assumptions as very few details have been uncovered so far. It is assumed that Belle Vale farm was inherited by the oldest brother Henry and held in trust for him until he came of age. In 1856 he probably came into his inheritance and took his brothers to live on the Gateacre property. During this period or possibly just before all the brothers worked in a soap rendering plant at Widnes. Thomas became the farmer and the other brothers remained working either as ‘commercial clerks’ at the Widnes factory or some other location. It seems most likely that at some stage between 1856 and 1862 Edward Latham worked as a ‘commercial clerk’ in a brewery in Gateacre or nearby.
In the brief period between the 1861 Census and the departure of Thomas and Edward for Australia it is assumed that the oldest brother Henry died, that the farm was inherited by Thomas, and that the farm was then sold to finance the trip to Australia and enable the brothers to establish themselves in the colonies.
The above assumptions have been loosely based on some aspects of Latham’s later life. He certainly appears to have enough funds to have travelled as a ‘gentleman’ in Australia for two years, to have possibly purchased some property during this time and made an advantageous marriage at the end of this period. I originally suspected that the brothers may have been involved in some form of commercial fraud but after discovering the Belle Vale farm listing in the 1861 Census it seems most likely that his source of income was inherited. Fraud was suspect because of Latham’s ruthlessness as a businessman and his involvement in a number of distinctly ‘shady’ land deals in the Melbourne land boom of the 1880s. One example of this was his purchasing of blocks of land as a ‘dummy’ in an Estate in which he had a substantial share holding, and which was controlled by his son-in-law, to force up the price of sale. The mystery surrounding the Liverpool and Gateacre years is enhanced by his brief dismissal of his early life and his apparent failure to return there during his world trip of 1883-4.
Two legacies of Latham’s early life later include his repeated naming of many of the buildings owned and purchased by him and his family ‘Knowsley’ and ‘Sefton’ and his strong and loyal attachment to the Church of England. This latter feature would indicate that his early life in orphanages or boarding schools run by the Church were relatively happy ones. Latham died in Melbourne in 1905. The Carlton Brewery which he put on a firm financial footing is now the famous multi national Carlton & United Breweries and many of the stone mansions and buildings he built remain including ‘Raheen’ in Kew and ‘Lathamstowe’ in Queenscliff.
* The author, P.D. Gardner, is a regional historian residing in Gippsland Australia and studying the coal capital of that district and the associated land boom in Melbourne in 1880s. He is especially interested in Latham’s early career in Liverpool and Gateacre and hopes to establish with some certainty how Latham funded his voyage to Australia and his early years of residence there. He can be contacted by email |