A remarkable life: Frewen's final chapter

Jerome Park, Hugh Frewen's final home.This is the seventh and final in my series on the sprawling life and times of Captain Hugh Frewen. 

 1922 was a fateful year in the life of Hugh Frewen.

His period as a political agent in Iraq had come to an end as had his marriage to donna Maria Nunziante. He now married Rosalind Jones, the daughter of a gardener on an adjoining estate. This marriage would bring three sons and two daughters to add to the two sons from his first marriage.

Restless, Frewen joined a proposed British Pacific Scientific Expedition to New Guinea as entomologist, sailing for Australia with his new wife towards the end of 1922.

The Expedition’s patron died while they were en-route and Frewen and his wife decided to leave the ship at Adelaide and settle in Australia under the patronage of the Governor of South Australia.

There Frewen found work hard to come by. “It came as a shock” Frewen wrote later, “to discover that Englishmen of good general education, but without capital or specialized training, were apparently not in demand in that part of the Empire.”

In South Australia, Frewen worked variously as a bulder’s labourer, as a journalist and radio broadcaster and real estate and securities salesman. He continued writing and became involved in politics and public commentary. 

In 1927, the Frewens moved to Queensland where Frewen again pursued varied activities, adding company promoter and orchid collecting to his list of occupations. By 1931, the Frewens were in severe financial difficulties.

Through happenstance, they were able to move onto a small block at Tyringham where the family built their own home from local timber and established a small holding that provided food and a small income.

Around 1938 they acquired a block on the Dorrigo where Frewen built another home that he named Jerome Park after his mother’s family.

It was during the Tyringham period that Frewen became involved in activities directed at agricultural and economic development and the achievement of self-government for New England.

As the war ended, still restless and still in love with exploration and the sea, Frewen left the family at Dorrigo and went trading around Fiji and the Pacific Islands. Finally, he retired to Dorrigo where he died in 1967.

It had been a remarkable life, a life I have only sketched in these columns. Frewen had inherited his father’s curious mind, his love of writing, his restless spirit. To some degree too, he had also inherited that sometimes lack of commercial practicality that led to his father’s nickname, Mortal Ruin.

It had been a long journey from the America in the gilded age through the courts of Europe to the Dorrigo Hills, one that provides yet another thread in the fascinating history of New England.

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express Extra on 25 September 2019. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not all on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited/History Matters columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015,  here for 2016, here  2017, here 2018, here 2019