The Bassendean Pensioner Guard Cottage and Residence

Standing at 1 Surrey Street, very near the river at Bassendean, is a simple, rectangular, brick, two-roomed, convict-era structure. Built from 1855-1857 it is one of four such cottages built on two-acre blocks facing Surrey Street; two were demolished in the 1920s, and the third in the 1940s. Consequently this is the only one from the old ‘Pensioner Guard Village’ remaining, and the only Pensioner Guard cottage still standing in Perth. It has high original integrity and, apart from minor factors, remains largely unaltered. 

The property was placed on the National Trust’s register in 1987. In 1988 it was purchased by the Town of Bassendean and, in 1994, added to the States’s Register of Heritage Places.

For years it has been cared for by the Bassendean Historical Society, who furnished and opened it periodically to visitors. More recently, the Town of Bassendean accepted the Museum of Perth’s proposed plan for the purchase, restoration and conservation of the 1856-built cottage and 1893-built residence, next door.

The 1893-built residence became a boarding house in the 1950s, undergoing significant modifications and, by the 1980s, had ceased being used as a home. Under their ownership the Town of Bassendean intended to create a museum within the residence but this never eventuated and, in recent years, it has been used as a daycare centre. This building has little original integrity.

History

In late 1854, four years after the first convict ship arrived in Fremantle, land facing Surrey Street, Guildford (renamed West Guildford in 1901 and, in 1922, Bassendean), was set aside for the building of 12 Pensioner Guard cottages, of which only four were eventually built, each one on a two acre block. The making of bricks for the walls and the splitting of roof shingles soon began and construction proceeded, with convict labour, under the supervision of Royal Engineer Lieutenant Edmund DuCane. Completed in early 1857, the first tenants moved in, in June.

 John Law-Davis was a private with the Honourable East India Company, 2nd Madras European Light Infantry, who joined the Enrolled Pensioner Guards and arrived in Western Australia on 7 February 1853 on the Dudbrook. He married Amelia Wood on 3 July 1856 and their first child, Amelia, was born on 17 May 1857. 

 John was appointed caretaker of all four cottages in the new Pensioner Guard Village, and was the first to move into No: 1 with his wife and baby daughter. Six more children were subsequently born in the cottage: William in 1858, Frederick in 1860, John in 1862 (died in 1865), Benjamin in 1864, Elizabeth in 1866, and Joseph in 1868.

 In time the other three cottages’ tenants moved in and, after seven years’ occupation, each was able to claim free ownership. John was the first and obtained the title for his land and cottage in late 1864.

John died from dysentery on 2 June 1870, aged 54, leaving his cottage to his oldest son William (12), and Amelia with six children aged between two and 13. She remarried, to John Bates, in 1873. They remained living in the cottage where two more children were born: Maria in 1873, and John in 1875. 

 John Bates is reported as having died in 1891 but that poor soul, who was the worse for drink when he drowned in Geraldton, had only been in Australia for seven years. Two other John Bates’ are therefore more likely as being Amelia’s husband: one dying from illness in the Perth Public Hospital in December 1898, aged 65; and the other dying suddenly on 26 September 1899. And although John Law-Davis had given Amelia the right to live in the cottage for the rest of her life, she was living with her youngest daughter, Maria, in Jersey Street, Jolimont, just after the turn of the century. She died in the Home of Peace, Subiaco, on 8 May 1909, aged 77.

Amelia's son, William Law-Davis, sold the cottage to pastoralist and grazier Edmund Brockman in 1890. Brockman had arrived in Western Australia with his parents in 1830. He had been Chairman of the Swan Road Board and had served as a Member of the Legislative Council, on and off, since 1878. In 1890 he was one of the first 15 Members of the Legislative Council, appointed by the Governor, and therefore part of the first parliament in Western Australia under responsible government. 

In 1893 he built a large residence next door to the original cottage, adjoined by a verandah, for his oldest daughter Frances and her husband Aubrey Brown who were already living in the area. Aubrey was the younger brother of famous West Australian explorer Maitland Brown, and Kenneth Brown, infamous father of Edith Dircksey Cowan OBE who was hanged for shooting dead his second wife in 1875. 

 Frances and Aubrey Brown lived in the residence with their six children, reportedly using the cottage as the kitchen and dining room, until Aubrey died on 13 May 1909, aged 67. There are many reports of Frances having then sold the home but, while she moved out to Railway Road for two years during WWI, she otherwise remained living there until at least 1921. The address did change though, as Surrey Street became Perth Road in 1917, and subsequently changed back to Surrey Street in the mid-1940s. Frances died in Bassendean on 4 February 1923, aged 70.

 The house then changed hands several times, longer residents being secretary Edward and his wife Ethel McLean who, during their time living there from the mid-1930s, named it ’St Clair’s’. In 1953 they sold and moved to Wembley, and Stephen Laver moved in. A young blacksmith and country contract builder, he is the likely the one who modified the residence for use as a boarding house in the 1950s. He died in Bassendean in 1962, aged just 36.