Friday, December 8, 2023

 The Hardy Boys: the family that robs, assults and comitts arson together, stays together.

 

 

Linda May Rose

Linda was the seventh child of Charles and Mary Rose and was born in 1884. She was born while the family lived at Fleurty’s Point, near Castle Forbes Bay, before the family moved to Dover. 

The first notable thing about her is her name. By the 1940’s, Linda was the second most popular girls name, but in 1884, it was far more unusual. The Roses picked most unusual names for their children, like Nalta Rummond, Luther Charles Garnet and my ggrandmother, Kezia Athaliah. But, I'll get to those later. Linda is the first ancestry biography of all the Rose children.

Searches for our Linda bring a few results. There is her birth (where her name is spelled Linder), her marriage to William Hardy on the 9th March, 1901; and the subsequent ten children’s births-

William Victor (1902), Frank Edgar, Bernie Gallingham, Walter Rueman, Herbert George aka James, Connie Maisie May, Coral Ena Vay, Charles Robert, Linda Mavis and Mytle Irene (1919).

 

                                                     Ancestry.com, source unknown

 There is however a little more information on Linda’s husband, William Hardy.

William had already spent twelve months in prison seven years before they married.

  
 William Hardy Sen, 15/5/1894, twelve months for housebreaking. Libraries Tas                                                                                                                                                                              

The most insight we get into Linda’s life comes through her husband and children, with greatest coming from a fifty-six-page documentation of two of her sons' crime records.


The 1921 crime spree

The Onset   




By June, Frank and William had used their first and only First Offenders Act get out of jail free card.

 June 1921. The Files

Bertie 16 years.

On the 18th June, 1921, Dover Police Court filled out a Conviction of a Youth Offender form for young Bertie Gallington Hardy. Bertie did feloniously break and enter the Butchers Shop of Charles Palmer at Dover, and stole 2 £l notes, 1 pound of silver and one revolver. He was then committed to the care of the Boy’s Training School. This institution in New Town was to move north the following year, 1922, and become Ashley Home for Boys. 

The particulars of his parents list his father, William Hardy in Hobart Gaol, and his mother Linda May Hardy (Rose) of Dover; Occupation: Domestic.


Back then, boys institutionalised for crime were hired out for cheap labour. By March 30, 1922, F.B Jones had filled in an Application for a Boy for Service form, and Bertie was the boy dispatched to Mr Jones of Margate on the 11th April, 1922. His wages were to be 5 shillings a week, with 3s 6d a week payable quarterly to the Department, and the balance given weekly to the boy as pocket money. Even in today’s money (about $22), that’s very cheap labour.

Eight months later, Bertie went on one of his regular Sunday morning walks and failed to return. Mr Jones reported the absconding to the police. Correspondence over the next few weeks reveals Bertie had not been found and Mr Jones suggested he may have “returned to his people at Dover” and the “Pleasman is keeping a look out”.

              Libraries Tas

Three days before Christmas, the lad was arrested at Dover and sent temporarily to the New Town Infirmary & Consumptive Home.

By 1928, Bertie’s records reveal he was handed  £7 that was held in trust for him during his time as a Ward of the State.

 

Walter, 14 years.

Page 30 of this documentation brings Walter into the crime spree. Walter Reuman Hardy is convicted of the felonious break and enter of the shop of Price Brothers, where he stole two sovereigns, £1, 18s, and one gunmetal watch on the 14th June 1921, four days earlier than his brother’s crime.

Walter, like his brother, absconded from incarceration, back to Dover by September 1921, and by October, he was sent by the ferry Excella to Mr Nigel Pearce of Flowerpot under the same arrangement as his brother.

Presumably Walter’s mother wrote to her sons regularly. One of her letters is among the correspondence, one that the authorities weren’t too happy with. In July 1923, the Secretary of the Department of Children of the State, wrote to Mrs Wm. Hardy admonishing her in her encouragement in her son’s misbehaving and threatening a return to institutionalisation.

                                                             Libraries Tas

 In her letter she encourages Bertie to ‘give the Boss plenty of lip to quieten him’, and to ‘go to the police and tell them what happened’. 

                               Libraries Tas

Surrounded by affectionately large kisses and signed, not Mum or Mother, but L Hardy, her love and concern for her son is obvious. She seems happy with her new revolver and is keen to report that to Walter.

It’s interesting to speculate the circumstances. Minors hired out at cheap labour were readily abused. Was Bertie one such boy with a mother doing her best to protect him? Or was Bertie a young man with a bad attitude? Whatever the circumstances, Bertie stayed at Flowerpot with Mr Pearce for the next two years. Pearce writes that the lad is well liked in the district and has the makings of an industrious and upright citizen. Final correspondence reveals Bertie and his brother have obtained a selection of 100 acres at Port Esperance. He requests release of his money to buy a “moter byke”, and then more for survey fees, and finally the sum of £29 is released to him for clearing his land.

  Libraries Tas

 

 The Two Eldest Boys

William Victor Albury, age 20.

According to newspaper reports, the crime spree of June 1921 involved father, eldest son William, third son Bertie and fourth son Walter. William jnr was of age when his crime caught up with him. He was placed in the Hobart Gaol on 13th June for 3 months for Receiving. Early August he was found having tobacco in his possession not issued by Gaol authorities. By October having served his first stint, he was convicted with Larceny and sentenced to another 3 months.



                                       Libraries Tas

 William senior was sentenced to twelve months imprisonment on 13 June, 1921. He was awarded Freedom by Special Permission on 11 March, 1922.

 

Frank Edgar Olga, age 19.

With no record coming up as a criminal, perhaps Frank, the 2nd son was not involved in the 1921 family crime spree. A search for Frank in the Huon Times newspaper however reveals thirteen reports of crime between 1922 and 1932. It can only be surmised that for each crime, there were others executed and evaded by local police. Most of Frank’s crimes were minor, except for a rather nasty grievous bodily harm inflicted with an axe. Perhaps Frank was imprisoned for this one, as things go quiet for him from this date to the inquest of his death in 1941, aged 38. 

               Libraries Tas

Frank was connecting high tension electric wires carrying 11,00 volts and was electrocuted by his own act of misadventure.

Trove. Examiner, 25th September 1931

Herbert George & Charles Robert

The youngest two boys were twelve and nine during the 1921 family crime spree, but crime was not to evade them either. Ten years later we find another spree involving Herbert, which starts in January with the larceny of motor tools. Then in April 1931, eighteen-year-old Charles and twenty-two-year-old Herbert find themselves at the Dover Police Court before two JP’s and Inspector Grant, charged with having damaged six apple trees. The boys pleaded not guilty, but evidence was given that they had wilfully rolled stones down a hill so that they would strike the trees in the plaintiff’s orchard.

 By May, things escalate from a childish act of vandalism, to one of arson for Herbert. He is found before the Coroner on May 21st 1931, along with his brothers Frank and Walter, in the investigation of the burning of a barn. Here we read, Herbert, age 22, is aka James. Evidence was found to charge Herbert with the felonious setting on fire of the barn, with insufficient evidence to implicate Frank and Walter. Herbert was committed for trial at the next sitting of the Supreme Court. This same report brings up another suspicious barn fire six months previously.

Charles Hardy Ancestry.com source unknown

For the most part, the boys married, had some children, and lived reasonably long lives.

 Linda and William also had four daughters, Connie Maisie May, Coral Ena Vay, Linda Mavis and Myrtle Irene. 

 The Girls

Connie, the eldest daughter, was almost thirteen when she is mentioned as a witness at the death and inquest of her grandmother Mary Rose in August 1924. Connie was at her grandparents’ home at the time, perhaps living with them. Family records state Connie then went to live with Mary’s eldest daughter, Linda's sister, Kezia, who was then in Franklin with most of her children by then young adults. Remembrances state Connie was ‘quite a handful’. Six years later she married Hadley Pirie Pepper in Hobart, and they had five children. Connie Pepper died in Hobart in 1996.

Coral and Linda, so far evade me in most searches. Linda must have gone by her middle name as she (Mavis) placed a memorial for her mother in the Mercury in May 1938. Mavis was then twenty-one. 

 Myrtle

In Linda (sen)’s 1923 letter to her son, she mentions that ‘Baby can talk now’, and that ‘she can run about’. Even with her tenth child, Linda was marking childhood milestones and reporting them proudly to 'baby's' older brother.

 This would have been Myrtle, who was two when Walter became a Ward of the State. Things seem to have gone sadly for Myrtle. Perhaps she had a congenital issue, perhaps she contracted a childhood illness, or mental illness, but at age nineteen, she was in the New Town Charitable Institute for nine weeks.

 She was listed as a domestic and as a mental d; presumably the 'd' stands for deficient. An inquest into her death in March 1948 found it to be natural causes and bronchopneumonia. Myrtle died at age twenty-eight at Lachlan Park Hospital, New Norfolk, a secure Mental Asylum, where she presumably had been living, perhaps for the previous eleven years.

 

Lachlan Park Hospital. Willow Court History group.


 Linda May Rose/ Hardy died in 1931.

The Huon Times gives a small obituary of Linda's death at age 48 in 1931, after a long and painful illness. Myrtle, the youingest of William and Linda's children, was only eleven years of age. 


Linda’s husband William had his third and final stint in Hobart Gaol in 1934. He served three months for receiving. His mug shot reveals a fifty-nine-year-old man looking much older than his years, a man who has lived a hard life and has endured plenty of life’s tough struggles. When William died at age sixty-four, in1939, his will reveals he had married again and his widow, Florence Bertha Hardy, was both executrix and sole beneficiary of his real and personal estate.

                                                        Libraries Tas

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