Thomas Hobbs Clutterbuck returned to Melbourne in 1883, where both he and John became taxi drivers in league with their brother, Frederick. Taxis at this time, were horse drawn vehicles and the streets were often muddy, rutted, unsealed and fouled up with animal excrement so the smell of this alone was quite unpleasant. From the mid 1880‘s, red gum blocks from the Grampians area were used to pave the tramway roads.
Old tramway tracks paved with Red gum blocks
A far greater assault on the nose, however, was the rotting food scraps, slops, and sewerage that flowed through the streets in open gutters, which meant a gut wrenching stench persistently hung in the air. It also meant that sickness and disease like typhoid and diptheria were a constant battle, with infant mortality rates alarmingly high.
Thomas’s brothers, John and Frederick, married sisters, Georgina and Mary Annie Laing from Port Fairy in 1883 and 1885, respectively, and settled in adjacent cottages in Charlotte Street, Collingwood.
Then, on November 16, 1888, four years after settling in Melbourne, Thomas and Alice Barnes were married by “Rev.” Nathaniel Kinsman, a lay clergyman of St Marks, Free Church of England, in Fitzroy. According to newspapers of the time, the unordained Mr Kinsman, who was the son of a Church of England clergyman from Leeds in Yorkshire, was well known throughout the colony as “the marrying parson” having performed more than 10 000 marriages.
Mr Kinsman’s popularity was largely due to his liberal outlook where marriage was treated as “purely a matter of business”. A man of discretion, he asked only those questions absolutely necessary, “conducting the ceremony at any hour, with any degree of privacy and at exceptionally cheap rates.”
Although many marriages were performed in St Marks Church, it is entirely possible that Thomas and Alice were married at Mr Kinsman’s residence in Moor Street, where a couple of local residents obliged as witness signatories.
St Marks, Free Church of England, Fitzroy
By 1891, Melbourne’s thriving boom years and high times were coming to an end. Banks closed their doors, financiers and stockbrokers panicked and thousands of people lost their jobs, their homes and their savings. Many families were plunged into a period of hardship and in these dark days before antibiotics or immunisations were available, malnutrition and illness took a cruel toll. For John and Georgina, only four of their ten children survived beyond the age of 2. For Frederick and Mary Annie, five of their nine children survived.
For Thomas Hobbs and Alice, the next decade was fraught with illness and despair. They drifted from one address to another in what were the working class suburbs of Melbourne; Collingwood, Fitzroy and several places in Carlton. Two of their children were born blind and passed away shortly, thereafter. Others died from common diseases of the time like whooping cough and scarlet fever. Of eight children born to them, only 2 survived beyond infancy; Eva Caroline, born in 1891, and Thomas Henry, born 1898.
Melbourne 1890's: "Among the Workless" - Women, children and elderly cue at a free soup kitchen