Williamstown amateur historian Barb McNeill is Star Weekly’s history columnist. This week she recounts a drama-filled visit to Australia by Prince Alfred, the son of Queen Victoria.
The morning of 4 January, 1868 heralded a public holiday for the people of Williamstown, for who was to grace the town but Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, second son of Queen Victoria!
The first royal visitor to Australia was to lay the foundation stone for the Alfred Graving Dock, a monumental feat of engineering that had taken tons of locally quarried basalt to build, and Williamstowners were in party mode. It had also taken years of civic wrangling, exhausting manual labour, thousands of pounds, and was still unfinished, but none of that seemed to matter. Williamstown was determined to put on a good show and enjoy itself.
Prince Alfred was feeling a little less jolly that day. The colonies had treated him somewhat roughly since he first arrived on the Galatea on 31 October, 1867 at Glenelg, South Australia, where the temperature was doing its best to bake the inhabitants alive. Unaware that he was to face a marathon endurance trial throughout his entire tour, he listened politely to the obsequious word salads uttered by the welcoming committee, made the right responses, and was launched into a dizzying whirl of balls, receptions, corroborees and banquets. The grand finale came when 20 huge bonfires blazed their farewells, adding considerably to the danger of bushfires.
Exhausted, he sailed to Melbourne, where 200,000 eager royalists deafened him with cheers, fanfares and yet more interminable speeches. Members of parliament, various mayors, dozens of councillors, more bonfires, and scores of white-clad girls strewing flowers in his path formed the welcome. Brass bands that had been frenziedly rehearsing for weeks blasted their tunes, and 11,000 schoolchildren sang the national anthem. Cricket matches and agricultural shows soon followed, as did military reviews, sporting fixtures, tree-planting, and more corroborees.
A huge free public banquet for the poor was scheduled to be opened by His Highness, with seating for 20,000 low-income citizens. Word sped around Melbourne – a free feast was on the agenda! In no time, the venue was surrounded by 50,000 extra persons all claiming extreme poverty, hence eligibility to don the nosebags and tuck in. They waited for Prince Alfred. And waited and waited. He never arrived. Police Captain Frederick Standish –former sly grogger and future Chief Commissioner of Police –became extremely jittery about the ugly mood of the mob, intercepted Prince Alfred en route to his latest test of endurance, and suggested he cross the banquet off his list of things to do. Alfred complied, and the crowds, famished and angry, rushed the tables and brawled savagely for fish, pies, roast bullocks, and five hundred gallons of free wine.
At a military review in Flemington, a cannon salute fired prematurely, blowing off a gunner’s hand. Festivities in Bendigo also had their share of tragedy, A model of the Galatea was paraded through the street, manned by a crew of small boys dressed in sailor suits. A shower of fireworks hit the little ship, burning it to cinders and killing three children.
Later in the week, a ball was to be held in the newly built Alfred Hall. The interior walls were tastefully draped with calico sheets on which were printed colourful designs. A gas bracket flared, igniting the sheets, and within minutes the hall was a raging inferno.
Having kept an eye on Victoria’s antics, New South Wales saw no reason why Prince Alfred should escape the full treatment. Arriving at Port Jackson, the noble visitor was promptly soaked in a torrential downpour which effectively extinguished both the welcoming bonfires and the tour organisers’ droning speeches. Ah, well. Behind every cloud is a silver lining … Storms notwithstanding, Alfred manfully did his duty by getting drenched to the bone whilst laying innumerable foundation stones and being deafened by massed bands playing uncomfortably close to his ears.
Impatient to shower the prince with northern hospitality, Queensland bleated indignantly for the royal guest to show himself. Alfred was greeted by a tropical monsoon in Brisbane, where a hot and cranky crowd, tired of waiting for a glimpse of him, commenced picking fights with one another and brawled ferociously until beaten back by the mounted police using equally vicious determination.
Then the people of Ipswich started raising a racket. Ipswich had a substantial number of German settlers, all eager to welcome a personage whom they regarded as thoroughly German via his ancestry. The unfortunate fact that Germany was not his land of birth was tactfully overlooked. With a fine crash of brass bands, they called for Prince Alfred to show himself to his loyal Germans. Unhappily for them, Premier Sir Robert McKenzie loathed the townspeople with a violent hatred. Ipswich barely saw a few fleeting minutes of the royal visitor before the premier bundled him off to Jondaryn. There he spent a terrible night in Jondaryn’s sole accommodation of a derelict cow shed, fighting off squadrons of ravenous mosquitoes.
Enraged at this treatment of a German prince, Ipswich lost no time in constructing, with Teutonic thoroughness, an effigy of Premier McKenzie, which, accompanied by stirring brass bands, was paraded through the town before being burned to a crisp.
Small wonder that Prince Alfred, on returning to Victoria, was mentally and physically spent and dreading what Williamstown had in store for him. It was something of an anti-climax when all went off without a hitch, and the foundation stone was laid. Yes, there were miles of flags and bunting, noisy crowds, and the inevitable speeches, but the day was spent in a festive atmosphere, and nobody in Williamstown shoved him into cow sheds or even burned buildings to the ground. To farewell the visitor, the residents illuminated the windows of their shops and homes at night, delighted that Alfred was gliding off to Sydney with happy memories of our port.
His pleasure in the last leg of his journey was soon dimmed when on 12 March at a fundraising picnic in Clontarf, Henry James O’Farrell, a rumoured Fenian, fire a shot at Alfred. The bullet was deflected by his braces, and a maddened crowd descended on the would-be assassin and tried to tear him apart. He was rescued by the police for a state execution, and Alfred recovered. He was scheduled to go to New Zealand, but his medical adviser considered that the strain would be too great to bear.
With secret relief, the prince returned to England.
Alfred’s ordeal has not deterred other royals from visiting Australia, which, having shown just what it’s capable of doing to bluebloods, is truly remarkable.
