Elizabeth Emma Fooks was baptised at Melcombe Regis (Weymouth) on 31 January 1790, the daughter of William and Ann Fooks. She was most likely elder sister to my 3xgreat grandmother, Mary Fooks. 

She married Thomas Lipson (1784–1863), a naval officer, at Melcombe on 30 July 1812. Interestingly, according to his naval biography, Lipson had been in the Montague from 1803, although by the time Lazarus Roberts (my 3xgreat grandfather) joined this ship in 1808, Thomas had transferred and was acting lieutenant of the Sabrina. However, like Lazarus, he was present on 22 August 1805 for Admiral Cornwallis’s  attack on the French fleet close to Brest harbour. 

After the war ended in 1815, Thomas Lipson joined the revenue service and was lieutenant of the RC Lapwing for a couple of years from 1816. He and Lazarus were of the same rank and age, both from Devon (Lipson was born at Dartmouth or Plymouth), and both had served in the same actions during the war. The Lipsons probably lived at Plymouth in the 1810s so perhaps Lazarus did too, after he was discharged from the Navy, and an acquaintance with Thomas was the reason he also joined the Coastguard and revenue service and, in 1823, married Lipson’s sister-in-law, Mary?

By 1820, the Lipsons were living in Brittany, with Thomas on half pay from the Royal Navy. According to a fascinating report in the Standard (20 May 1828), he had a brother, John, who was a man of very short stature, only three feet. John Lipson exhibited himself in various sideshows of the day, earning four shillings a week, but in 1828 wound up at London’s Guildhall on a charge of drunkenness. He was described as ‘a man so small that his dimensions to any thick sight were almost imperceptible’ and the sight of him standing in the courtroom beside a six-foot constable was clearly the cause of some amusement for those present. The alderman asked if he had any family. ‘I’ve got a brother, the captain of a man-of-war – Thomas Lipson – I dare say you may have heard of him – he lives over in France yonder, upon his half-pay,’ replied John. And was he of similar height, the alderman asks. ‘Oh no; he is of a manly size – as your worship may be,’ replied John, to much laughter in court. John Lipson died in 1837, as reported in various newspapers: ‘the dwarf, John Lipson, was found dead in his bed, in the Plymouth workhouse; he had been an inmate for some time, in consequence of having been subject to epileptic fits.’

Meanwhile, Thomas Lipson returned to England and in the autumn of 1836 the family emigrated to Australia, on board the Cygnet, where Thomas was appointed South Australia’s first naval officer, its first collector of customs and harbour master of Port Adelaide. 

Thomas Lipson died on 24 October 1863 aged seventy-nine, leaving his widow £600. The death notice in the South Australian Advertiser incorrectly states that he married the ‘daughter of Mr. William Took, of Plymouth’ (i.e. William Fooks of Weymouth), but also provides this detail of his Coastguard career in England:

By all accounts Thomas sounds a friendly fellow, as noted in his obituary in the South Australian Register:

One particular trait in the character of the lamented gentleman should not he lost sight of, and that is that general urbanity and affability which at all times marked his conduct in his intercourse with persons of inferior rank in life. An old acquaintance, though he might he in humble garb, was to him an old friend, and was recognised as such wherever met, and many a time has his warm heart flushed his happy face on meeting a subordinate or tradesman busy about his ordinary duties. Open hearted, candid, and outspoken himself, he sought and felt delight in association with similar minds, wherever he found them.

Elizabeth outlived most of her children and died in Australia at the grand age of ninety, on 30 May 1880, ‘to the last her faculties were almost unimpaired’, trumpeted her obituary.

Elizabeth and Thomas Lipson had six children, who were my great-great grandfather’s cousins, although the information below is quite probably more than he ever knew of them. They had colourful lives: 

Emma Catherine Mary (Ann) Berry Lipson

Born 1813; died 28 April 1876. As a widow in 1856, she married Sir George Strickland Kingston, a surveyor and who had also emigrated to Australia on board the Cygnet. He was apparently widely unpopular, not least with Thomas Lipson, and viewed as a tactless and somewhat boorish character. He was also twice widowed when Emma Catherine Mary married him. George had five children from his previous marriage all under the age of fifteen and may have felt that the children would have benefited from having a mother. When her husband was knighted she become Lady Kingston.

Berry James Lipson

Born 1816 and died 1872. He was a clerk in the Colonial Secretary’s office but was convicted of larceny in 1851 and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. He married Louise Mary Heaney (1835–84).

Eliza Anne Lipson

Eliza Anne Lipson was baptised in Devon, 1818/19. In 1840 she married John Allan (1791–1865?), who was apparently involved in defrauding the South Australian Police Department in 1841, with his brother-in-law Henry Inman (see Mary Fooks Lipson, below). 

Lorna Banfield in Like an Ark: The Story of Ararat writes of the Allans, who were the first occupants of a remote homestead they called Allanvale, later Concongella, Victoria. She comments that Eliza died in 1843, not long after their arrival, at the birth of their third child. Such were the perils of women in childbirth in the bush, far from medical care. She was buried on adjoining property (along with their infant daugher Eliza). Her headstone reads ‘Sacred to the memory of Eliza Ann Allan who departed this life on 15th March, 1845, aged 26’. C.E. Sayers in Shepherds Gold: A History of Stawell writes that Allan was heartbroken from the death of his young wife. 

According to Banfield, Allan was in financial difficulties and soon after his wife’s death he surrendered Concongella to Dr Blundell. In 1937 Eliza’s gravestone was uncovered in a garden and proclaimed to be that of the first white woman in Wimmera. Apart from the infant who died with her mother, Eliza seems to have had two previous children, one of whom was John Eneas/Aeneas Lipson Allan.

Mary Fooks Lipson

Mary Fooks Lipson was born on 27 March 1820 at Rennes, Ille-et-Vilaine, Brittany, France, while her father was on half-pay from the Royal Navy. She married Henry Inman (1816–95), at Adelaide in 1839. Henry became the Inspector of Police in South Australia but was dismissed following a scandal over pay for hay for police horses. After this the family returned to England in the 1840s, where Henry took holy orders and eventually became the rector of North Scarle in Lincolnshire. 

Mary Fooks Inman (née Lipson) died in 1898, three years after Henry. They had four sons, of whom Henry junior returned to Australia, with tales of his grandfather’s naval exploits in the early years of the century. 

Like her siblings Mary Fooks Inman was a cousin of James Mackenzie Roberts (my great-great grandfather), and as she was the only child of Elizabeth Emma to end up in England, were they perhaps known to each other? 

Thomas Hardy Lipson

Born 1823/6, probably also in France; died 18 March 1862; a customs officer at Port Adelaide. He married a Rebecca Jane/Meeverly Mortimer (born circa 1833) in Australia in the early 1850s and they had several children. Thomas Hardy Lipson died at River Light, Kapunda, South Australia. Rebecca Meeverly Lipson died 28 July 1913, aged about eighty, and is buried at Willunga Anglican cemetery. A Richard, infant son of Thomas and Rebecca Lipson, also lies here. 

Louisa Lipson

The youngest child was born in England in 1829 and died in Australia in 1918, aged eighty-nine. She was thus the last survivor of the Lipson family who emigrated from England in 1836. She married James Collins Hawker, the son of Vice Admiral Edward Hawker, RN, in 1850. Hawker (1821–1901), a tide surveyor and later pastoralist and stock and station agent, was the author of the book Early Experiences in South Australia (E.S. Wigg &​ Son, 1899/1901). Their home was Ashford, on Strangways Terrace, North Adelaide. They had at least nine children, including Edward Lipson Hawker (1851–1927), another naval man, and James Clarence Hawker (1859–1951), one of the first Australian-born soldiers to reach high rank.