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).
William had already spent twelve months in prison seven years before they married.
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
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”.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
Frank was connecting high tension
electric wires carrying 11,00 volts and was electrocuted by his own act of misadventure.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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