Now, does this represent some error on the part of the registrar? Does it imply that Mrs Collins was lying? Is it the truth? Was it easier to simply tell a lie because you hadn’t thought to bring your previous marriage lines out to the colonies with you in order to prove your status? After all, you had only intended a lengthy holiday in order to get over a tragedy, and colonial officialdom could be relatively easily hoodwinked. How do you turn Emma Blake into Emma Collins and then into Emma Norris…and then into Emma Reeves? Was this woman ever a Blake from a rich London family whose family home was just off Grosvenor Square?

Fact and fiction occasionally meet. Emma Georgina Blake was indeed the daughter of George, a cabinet-maker, and his wife, Emma Matilda. In 1868, at the age of sixteen she married James Norris, also sixteen, a chimney-sweep and son of a chimney-sweep, not at St Margaret’s, Westminster, but rather at St John the Evangelist, Waterloo. Poor Emma was widowed at age seventeen. Two years later, the young widow, with not the strictest regard for truth, lied about her age, described herself as being twenty-one and with both parents deceased—this second detail at least half untrue! She did take passage on the ship La Hague to Sydney as an assisted immigrant, with her occupation listed as ‘General Servant’ along with a shipload of other young women similarly described. It is quite likely they needed to be chaperoned. In 1872, she married Francis Reeves. A year or two later her older sister, Ann, married William Treloar at St Margaret’s, Westminster, and eventually ended up as lady mayoress of London, wife of a baronet.

I am clearly an arbitrary genealogist, and until very recently had not spared much thought or time to poor old Francis, my great-grandad, knowing little of him other than that he had minimal literary skills! Francis Reeves, son of Francis Reeves, had followed his dad to the land down under. He had not seen dad for quite a while, because Francis senior had departed for southern shores when Francis junior was still a little boy. Francis senior had also taken an assisted passage to Australia, although it seems more than likely that he didn’t want to make the trip—a rather less than voluntary jaunt! In 1843, having been found guilty of larceny at the Old Bailey in London, my great-great grandfather, Francis Reeves of Kentish Town, was sentenced to seven years’ transportation. Lost in the mists of time are any details of his actual crime, but the Old Bailey records show Francis receiving the most draconian sentence handed down at that particular court sitting. Francis senior obviously did his time, stayed on in Australia for at least a while, and maybe it was he who had taken up the land that my great-grandfather eventually farmed at Kempsey in New South Wales. At some stage the senior Francis returned to London, where he died in 1883 at age seventy-eight and was buried in the East London Cemetery.

In the early 1900s, Great-Aunt Emma, having won the war against the Boers, dumped her only child, Eleanor, my Aunty Nell, into the care of her sister, my grandmother. My father always regarded his cousin Nell as more of a sister on account of her spending most of her childhood being brought up by his parents. Great-Aunt Emma was off to London to do her bit to retrieve the family fortune. Clearly remittances to the Sydney bank account had come to an end or were in danger of drying up. The family had been awarded the leases on some of the properties in Ludgate Hill in the City in return for services to the Crown during the Napoleonic Wars. Precisely what services the forebears of an albeit prosperous London cabinet-maker might have provided to the Crown can only be a matter of conjecture. The leases were not in perpetuity, but for a term of 100 years. The 100 years were up and the family was looking for an extension.

Great-Aunt Emma stayed with her aunt and uncle, Sir William and Lady Treloar. Sir William was the Lord Mayor of London, and his own great fortune had been made from carpets. Lady Treloar was the sister of Mrs Hamilton-Norris-Reeves. However, regardless of all that pedigree, position or fortune, they had no luck whatsoever in restoring their lost incomes and the leases reverted to the Crown.

In 1977 I took my two boys to London to spend Christmas with their mother. On a cold London January day I made them walk up and down Ludgate Hill. ‘This was once all ours,’ I proclaimed loudly, startling the few passers-by who were out in the freezing weather. And later: ‘Your great-great-great-uncle and -aunt once lived there,’ as I pointed to Mansion House. They were about as impressed as when I insisted on taking them, at great expense, to the Royal Ballet to enjoy The Nutcracker…having had to bribe them with a double visit to the first of the Star Wars movies.

Sir William and his wife were childless. They offered to adopt the two eldest of Mr and Mrs Reeves’s four little Aussie girls: Great-Aunt Emma and my grandmother, Annie. Stupidly, Mr and Mrs Reeves declined this generous offer, reputedly with the words ‘You can’t pick and choose.