Alice had made it to London—the Royal Docks at the Port of London, at any rate, a few twists of the Thames east from the city’s centre. The girl from Glasgow had arrived in the music capital of her world, and no sooner had she set foot in it than she was boarding the gangway of the Berrima for a voyage of more than 13,000 miles.
Physically packing up her life wouldn’t have taken much time. There wasn’t much room at home for accumulating the sorts of things other young women drew to themselves like iron filings. Alice had her house clothes and her good clothes, and what she didn’t have she knew how to make. In any event the Berrima had a strict baggage limit per passenger. The bulk of Alice’s weight allowance was most likely taken up in copies of the church music repertoire, some of it as yellowed as the smoke-stained walls of the sitting room at 370 Dumbarton Road.
Perhaps there was music at the Docks that marked the beginning of Alice’s journey; more likely she heard the percussion of mass travel—the wails of children, the sniffles of women, the thud of boots and the scrape of luggage—punctuated by the bellows of the mighty ship as the time neared for departure. She would never set foot in Covent Garden, or hear a concert at the Royal Academy of Music. There would be no scholarship to the Guildhall School or the Royal College of Music. There would be no position as a private music teacher for an aristocratic young lady while she undertook the grand tour. Alice would not become a governess for an upper middle-class family in London, or on one of the country estates where bored daughters idled their young lives away reading Jane Austen and waiting for a husband. I wonder if Alice thought about all the kindred musical spirits she might have met if she’d only had the opportunity to study and work in London, and if that knowledge was harder for her to bear than the thought of never seeing her brothers again.
There was no one on the Docks waving her goodbye. Who could have afforded the time and the travel for such an extravagant gesture? But perhaps she wished someone was waving her off who would miss her. She might have thought of the people she’d known in her life till now, and wondered why she was still by herself when other girls had found husbands. It couldn’t be solely because she had chosen poorly in John Henry Edwards. Alice would have heard of similar stories often enough in the past three years to know bigamy was unfortunate but far from rare. Did she suspect that something was wrong with her? That her focus on music took up all the room where proper love for a husband should have been? That she had been so devastated and humiliated that she doubted she could believe the words of any man.
Thinking about Alice’s decision to emigrate, I struggle to understand why she gave up her job at Gardner Street. Resigning from that coveted position would have been the biggest decision of Alice’s life that she had made with complete information. Did she feel bereft or liberated? She knew no one at her destination with connections that might help her find the work for which she was best suited. And although she carried letters of recommendation, what significance would they be given by people unfamiliar with the institutions of her study and work? As the Berrima embarked on its seven-week voyage, I wonder if Alice considered that it had taken years for her to make her musical network, and that she was sailing away from those who could help her, recommend her, point her in the right direction. That while she’d married a sailor, it was she who had ended up at sea, floating to the bottom of the world.
I suspect my grandmother failed to value her skills as a musician. She most likely underestimated the value of her contribution to the musical life of her home town, even though she was a paid professional, being the choirmistress of two well-established churches and performing regularly as a soloist. She had suffered the humiliation of marrying a bigamist, but had continued to work during and after the scandal. I believe she lacked faith in her ability to go on making a living as a choirmistress; and that, coupled with the unspoken expectations of her family that she marry in order to secure her financial future, drove her from Glasgow to Australia.
Alice’s parents had not abandoned her. Charlotte and James Taylor were present for the momentous occasion of their daughter’s departure for the new world—but not to wave her goodbye. Passenger records from the Berrima show that Charlotte and James boarded the ship in third class like their daughter. Unlike Alice, they held return tickets. On the passenger list, James Taylor’s occupation is described as boilermaker. The self-designation seemed to indicate career progression of a sort, but to be a boilermaker was still backbreaking manual labour. Now in his fifties, he must have taken leave without pay from Denny’s Shipyard in order to be
