EARLY BEGINNINGS OF THE MARLES CLAN (The following is taken from a variety of sources thought to be, but not guaranteed, true. Sources include my cousins, Robin Marles, Lynn Hayes, Brenda Hoskin, the Coffs Harbour District Historical Society and others.) The name Marles was likely French in origin, protestants who moved to England to escape Catholic persecution. Mines de Marles, a fair sized town in the Artois region of northeastern France near the Belgian border, is thought to be the ancestral village of the family. The family is rumoured to have been in the tapestry trade and to have moved to England around 1620. However, I met a person with the same surname and she says Marles is a Welsh name. I have checked this out a little and there are lots of Welsh people named Marles. There is a plethora of people named Marles from Spain and Latin America. However there is an accent on the “e” . Therefore pronunciation would be different. GREAT GRANDFATHER THOMAS MARLES Thomas Marles was born in 1808 in Ireland and died May 1881. His wife Sarah Wood Marles was born in 1815. Thomas was born in Ireland. Sarah is from Harborne District, Stafford County, England. Thomas was a mechanical engineer who worked at the Parrot Armament Works and Tangye Pump Works in England. He moved to Albany, New York in 1854 and worked at the Burton Iron Works. He cast the first rifled cannon barrel in North America. There is a statue of him in Ithaca, New York. He is buried in Oakwood Cemetry, Troy, New York. GRANDFATHER JAMES MARLES Born- May 8, 1849 near Birmingham, England. Two sisters Emma (born 1836) and Eliza (born 1838) Died- October 20th, 1925 at Rochester, Minnesota at the Mayo Clinic, where he had been taken by his wife for an operation for liver cancer. My paternal grandfather was born in a gritty industrial suburb, Smethwick, 100 years before I came on the scene. He lead an interesting life moving restlessly about the English speaking world from England to New York State, back to England, to California, to England, to Australia and finally to Alberta in 1906. Legend has it that he only went to school only one day in his life, yet his home was full of books and he liked to quote Shakespeare. He sang and danced and recited poetry readily upon request. He was a student of the Bible, and although a self proclaimed atheist, loved to argue theology with ministers of the gospel and was said to be selfdom beaten. James participated in gold rushes in Australia, California and British Columbia. He was an ardent traveller, entrepreneur, and British patriot. He stood by the Conservatives and the Unionists while in Calgary. He was reportedly a womanizer. He was tall, lean and muscular. James is reported to have never lost a fight. He would always find a way to beat the other guy, no matter what. The Coffs Harbour Historical Society writes, “... he was always ready to stand up for king and country. His high pitched voice could often be heard, as he lay down the law to some oppositionist, and strove to bring him to a proper sense of duty.” This leads me to wonder about the family I grew up in. Dad was gentle as a lamb. Mom wanted to call me James, but Dad overruled her. So instead they called me William, after my maternal grandfather. Along with his father, James moved to upstate New York to cast cannon for the civil war. James was apprenticed at the Burden Iron Works in Troy, New York. Along with thousands of others, he saw Lincoln in his coffin in 1865. Around 1870, he and a friend went to Sacramento, California, apparently hoping to join a gold rush. They passed through Chicago, just before the Great Fire. They saw buffalo from the train. In Sacramento, he and his friend took up a homestead. They almost starved to death so James went to work in the railyards and received steam papers to operate locomotives. They stayed only two years and returned to New York. Back in New York, they flipped a coin to decide whether they would go to Argentina or England. The coin decreed Argentina, but James decided to go to England by himself. When in England, he was persuaded in 1878 to go to Australia on government paid passage. It took the party of single men 90 days from Liverpool to Sydney. They were given a welcoming party by the governor of New South Wales. From there, he went 450 miles north to the Clarence River by water to get a job operating a steamboat. There was no overland transport. He worked at various jobs, one of which was delivering meat by boat and working around a sugar mill. He made use of his American steam papers to operate steamboats. A steamboat he operated was called the Iolathe. In 1879, James bought two lots, west of Moone Street in Coffs Harbour. In MacLean, Clarence River, he got married in 1880 to Catherine Davis, daughter of a local sugar cane grower. She was born January 23, 1859 and died in 1942. They had 11 children, two of whom died in infancy. Their youngest child was Alfred Austral Marles, born 1901, my father! Other offspring included Emma (born 1882), Eliza (1884) Thomas (1886), James (1887), John Cook (1890), Catherine (1891), George William (1893) and Dorothy (1898). They homesteaded in Coffs Harbour about 1883. They are considered one of the founding families of that city and a street is named after them. James tried to make a living a number of different ways. Besides homesteading, He was a bank courier for the local mining companies hauling gold 50 miles, government agent to the aborigines, paymaster for the local timber and mining companies, transporter of timber using 14 to 16 oxen, and a grower of orange trees. Among the jobs he completed were hauling the pilings for the first jetty in the town. In addition, he started a store in Coffs Harbour. They moved the store two or three times, each time making it bigger. In conjunction with James stores, Catherines brother Jack ran a delivery service. Eventually they had three other stores in surrounding communites. A large merchandising company tried to run them out of business but they only lasted six weeks. When the Bank of New South Wales came to Coffs Harbour in 1905, they set up in the Marles store and Catherine made the first deposit. By 1906 most of the commercial blocks on High Street had been built on except for a corner block bought by James. Two years later, Mr. Moorhead bought out Marles interest and erected the first two storey shop. As aborginal agent, he had a special relationship with the native blacks. The family fed them whenever they gathered around his place, which was about once a month. About 50 or 60 would gather at a time. King Billy of Bagawa died while camping in their area and he was buried in one of Catherines table cloths. In 1905, James visited Canada and bought a 320 acre farm southeast of Red Deer (Willowdale District N-1/2-9-37-26). He was accompanied by Jack, Catherines brother. The family moved to Canada on April 9 1906, after almost 30 years in Australia. They sailed on board the Maheno, a turbine-driven steamship, from Sydney to Vancouver. The voyage included stops in Brisbane, Fiji, Honolulu and Victoria, BC. It was a 21 day crossing. Jack Davis only lasted one year in Canada, before returning to subtropical Australia. In an article for an Australian newspaper, James writes about Victoria which had a population of nearly 21,000. He says, “I found a white mans country and a credit to the empire...” Vancouver had a population of nearly 31,000. “I stayed only until next morning so I am not in a position to describe the many interesting places I have read of in and about Vancouver, but in passing I may say that all I saw and heard indicated great prosperity and rapid growth.” “My next start was for Calgary, Alberta by train 842 miles... We found Calgary very cool, a nice little city with 9,000 or 10,000 population. It is a great ranching centre. The railway repairing shops are there and quite a number of wholesale houses distribute from this centre. A spur line runs north from it to Edmonton, nearly 200 miles distant.... My first stop was at Red Deer, a town of 1,100 to 1,300 inhabitants and growing fast... I was quite satisfied to settle in this district.” The Methodists held services one mile away and the Presbyterian Church was two miles away. James writes, “The neighbours are high class settlers”. “From the house I live in, which is on a rise, over 40 homesteads can be seen.” “Winter is long and, at times, very cold. It was 22 below zero last Sunday. It is now 45.” “We took possession of the farm on the 18th October. The ground did not freeze until November 28, which was unusually late. This enabled me to get over 50 acres ploughed.” Today many of us speculate as to why the family would move from a nice subtropical location to a cold place . One idea is that James couldnt find any suitors for his daughters in Australia. Yeah right! Another suggestion is that he needed a cool climate for his health. My best guess is that he felt there were more and better business opportunities in Canada, despite the fact he had many Australian business interests. Evidence that he wasnt doing that well comes from the Coffs Harbour District Family History Society. I quote one Cec Hammond of Bellingen, “My father, William Joseph Hammond, went to Woolgoolga in the late 1890s. He was a photographer at Bucca during the gold rush days and also a capable book keeper. The storekeeper at Woolgoolga, Mr Jimmy Marles, sent for him to manage the store at a salary of 15 shillings a week. Mr Hammond accepted. After some months, Mr Marles found he could not pay the salary, so offered the business to Mr. Hammond in lieu of wages owing.” Another explanation is that James had a restless spirit and just wanted a change from Australia. James sons, William and John, went off to serve in World War I, making it necessary for James and Catherine to sell the farm and move to Calgary in 1917. They owned and operated the Liberty Grocery Store on the corner of 11th Street and 14th Avenue West. They sold the store in 1919. James died in 1925 or 26 from liver cancer. Catherine moved back to Red Deer in 1937 to live with daughter Emma. In 1942, aged 83, she fell and fractured her hip and died of the complications that followed. Catherine and James are both buried in Union Cemetery in Calgary. UNCLE THOMAS MARLES Tom was the eldest son of James and Catherine. He was born January 15, 1886 in Coffs Habour, New South Wales, Australia. He joined the Northwest Mounted Police June 18, 1904 and was honourably (I presume) discharged June 17, 1909, after five years of service. He started in Battleford, Saskatchewan and wound up in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. To go from subtropical Australia to the Great White North must have been jarring to say the least and of course there was only a few hours of sunlight in the Yukon in the winter. Thomas was promoted to the rank of corporal on May 1, 1908. His regimental number was 4231. The Yukon Archives notes, “Mr. Marles was likely the last member to receive his regimental number under the North West Mounted Police. How unusual.” His years with the RCMP in Whitehorse roughly corresponded with those of the poet Robert Service who was a bank teller in the same town. As the population was only 800, they would have known each other. Service, however, was about 12 years older and there is no mention of Tom in either Services autobiography or in several biographies. Tom is the family ghost as he disappeared shortly after leaving the police force and was never heard from by the family again. Rumour has it that he quarrelled with father James and was, sadly, kicked out of the household in his early twenties. There is a theory that he went back to live in Australia, but this is not proven.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 01:01:06 +0000
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