A Friend of My People at Home: Marcus Clarke and Captain Frederick Standish

“Poor Clarke is on the voyage out to Australia, his father having met with a paralysis of the brain,” Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to Ernest Hartley Coleridge about their fellow student from Highgate School, Marcus Clarke, on March 22, 1863 (Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by C.C. Abbott). Clarke’s father, suddenly struck down with paralysis, was taken to a hospital for the insane at Stoke Newington, his financial affairs in complete disorder. Marcus, his expectations evaporated, was packed off to Australia where his uncle was a judge of the Court of Mines and of the County Court of Ararat in Victoria.

Marcus arrived in Melbourne on June 7, 1863, and promptly disappeared. In Marcus Clarke: An Annotated Bibliography Ian McLaren quotes documents preserved in the Melbourne Savage Club. On June 10 Marcus’s uncle James Langton Clarke sent a telegram from Ararat to Captain Standish, the Chief Commissioner of Police: 

Marcus Andrew Clarke my nephew aged seventeen arrived by Wellesley from London on Sunday. Mr Lamoile, Criterion Hotel, St. Kilda promised to go on board for him. Have heard nothing from either of them though I telegraphed Mr Lamoile yesterday. As he had three hundred pounds (300) something may have happened to him. I am anxious to know if he is safe. Langton Clarke, Judge. 

Captain Standish put out a memo to Superintendent Nicolson the same day: “For immediate inquiry. Shd any information be procured this evening, I wish it to be sent to my private residence. Frederick Standish, C.C.P.” The following day C.H. Nicolson sent a memo for immediate delivery: 

The young man Marcus Andrew Clarke arrived at the Criterion Hotel last night with his luggage, and a letter to that effect was forwarded to Judge Clarke from the landlord by last night’s post. M.A. Clarke left the hotel about noon today, having been invited out to dine. 

At various times in the future, Marcus’s life was to intersect with that of Captain Standish, the Chief Commissioner of Police.

The Clarke family had strong connections with Australia. Marcus’s father’s second brother, James Langton Clarke, had emigrated to Victoria in 1855. His father’s eldest brother, Sir Andrew Clarke, had been governor of Western Australia from February 1846 till his death a year later. Sir Andrew’s son, also called Andrew, was posted to Van Diemen’s Land in 1846 where he was private secretary to Governor Denison for six years. In 1852 he was appointed the first surveyor-general and chief commissioner of crown lands for Victoria, and member of parliament for Emerald Hill, positions he held until his return to England in 1858. According to Geoffrey Serle in The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1851–1861, he was known to some of his contemporaries as “Spicy Andrew”. Knighted in 1873, from 1873 to 1875 he was governor of the Straits Settlements, and then served on the council of the Viceroy of India.

Andrew had been brought up in part by Marcus’s father and uncle James while his own father was absent abroad on military duties. He corresponded regularly with Marcus’s father from Australia. R.H. Vetch in his Life of Lieut.-General The Hon Sir Andrew Clarke records: “When his uncle’s health suddenly broke down, Andrew Clarke sent his uncle’s only son Marcus out to Australia at his own expense and gave him a start in life.”

Judge James Langton Clarke was entrusted with looking after the young Marcus. The Journal of Annie Baxter Dawbin 1858–1868, edited by Lucy Frost, records “Judge Clarke and his nephew” at the opera for a performance of Le Prophète, June 26, 1864. Judge Clarke initially arranged employment for Marcus in the Bank of Australasia. It was not a success, and Marcus was then sent to a couple of Wimmera properties in which Judge Clarke had an interest, Swinton and Ledcourt near Stawell. However, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s brother Cyril remarked that Marcus “had begun to feel he was not adapted to the pursuit of sheep-farming”.

Captain Standish then offered Clarke the chance of an alternative, joining the mounted police. Cyril Hopkins quotes a letter Clarke wrote to him about the offer: 

But though the billet is a good one I should have to go to some infernal hole on the border and perhaps get shot by some old “lag”! … I may perhaps accept it. Heaven knows! … You must not confuse the mounted troopers with the home police; they are quite another kind of cattle. The inspectors and superintendents are all gentlemen, most of them old army men, and a troop is not by any means to be despised. One gets a house, a servant and four horses free; and in the non-settled districts is pretty well “monarch of all one surveys”.

Captain Standish, the chief, was in the Royal Horse Artillery and is a friend of my people at home. His offer is rather a compliment than otherwise. But there will be no station quarters, no comfortable escort duty, no government balls for me. I expect that I shall have to go “high up”, and may possibly even have the “Black Police” … Needs must, however, when the old gentleman drives! I often wonder how my life will end; the beginning of it is strange enough, God knows! What a change from all my old plans and hopes; the Foreign Office, jollity, good society, hunters, crack balls and diplomacy! 

A number of literary figures had joined the mounted police. Some of them Clarke came to know well, like the poets Richard Horne and Adam Lindsay Gordon and the novelist George Walstab. Clarke featured Horne as a mounted policeman in the serial version of His Natural Life in the Australian Journal, January 1872: 

Our captain seemed no less wild. He was dressed in an old frock-coat, high mud-boots, and a slouched hat. He wore his hair in long curls, sported a most elegant and curly moustache, which hung down in the most picturesque manner; carried a revolver in his belt, and pistols in his holsters; and rode habitually at full gallop. Who do you think he was? No less a person than the poet and author, Horsa Hengist—You remember Edgar Poe’s review of his book? 

In South Australia Adam Lindsay Gordon had enlisted in the mounted police ten days after his arrival in Adelaide in 1853, aged twenty. In “The Friend of Charley Walker”, Australian Letters (March 1961), Brian Elliott quotes a letter Gordon wrote to Walker back in Worcester: 

We have an easy billet of it here, whether a man likes a position depends more on himself than anyone but we have fine times of it really. The Mounted Police are all well mounted and well armed in a sort of undress cavalry uniform and they are armed with carbines, pistols and long dragoon swords. I was very near getting an inspectorship or captaincy but the rules compel a man properly speaking to serve as a trooper, many of our young fellows are gentlemen though not all and capital fellows some of them are … 

Another former mounted policeman was Clarke’s friend George Walstab, who wrote two episodes of the serial of Clarke’s first novel Long Odds when Clarke was unconscious and incapacitated from a serious riding accident. In an obituary of Walstab, George Gordon McCrae recalled the office of Clarke’s Colonial Monthly magazine: 

The walls of the editor’s den were frescoed, or rather penciled with topical and character sketches, battle-pieces, etc., but chief among these, and over the fireplace G.A.W. on a fiery charger just thrown back upon his haunches, above the legend, “Yes, it is true, gentlemen, that I was once a policeman … but then … ye gods! What a policeman!!!” 

In “The Golden Age of Australian Literature”, McCrae records of the portrait: “This was Walstab, who before he went out to India had served in the ‘Cadets’, who in their blue and silver lace used to be the cynosure of petticoated Melbourne.”

There may have been a personal motive behind Captain Standish’s offer to Marcus, the reciprocation of a favour done to him some years earlier. Standish had known Marcus’s cousin Andrew. Both were born in 1824, and both entered the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in 1840. Andrew was commissioned in the Royal Engineers, Standish in the Royal Artillery.

Standish’s career has been splendidly told by Paul de Serville in “A Clubman’s Life” in Pounds and Pedigrees: The Upper Class in Victoria 1850–80. “One of the most aristocratic of 1850s immigrants,” de Serville writes, he was commissioned second lieutenant in 1843, and for a while was aide-in-waiting at Dublin Castle. In 1852 he left England under an assumed name, Francis C. Selwyn, to avoid gambling debts. “J’aime le peuple, mais j’ai toujours eu la bourgeois en horreur, » he wrote in his diary on board ship. He spent a couple of years on the Victorian goldfields, prospecting unsuccessfully, and running a ginger beer establishment, which supplied sly grog. “Part dandy, part military worldling, part heavy duty swell,” writes de Serville, “his brief comments on polite society could come from the pen of a Radical.”

Marcus Clarke’s class attitudes were not dissimilar. Cyril Hopkins quotes a letter from him: 

I was somewhat of a “swell” (God help me!)—I was sent to the land of radicals and mob-law. I was fond of art and literature; I came where both are unknown, I was conversant with the manners of a class; I came where “money makes the gentleman”. I hated vulgarity; I came where it reigns supreme … I see daily before me a pit into which I dread to fall; the pit of vulgarity, ignorance, slovenliness and radicalism. In a word I dread lest I become like others. 

In later years, Henry Gyles Turner recalled in Once a Month (October 1885), Clarke “became bitterly caustic in his fanciful comments on the smug world, which makes up the majority of our fellow creatures, and his radicalism was very red”.

Standish was at a low ebb when first re-encountered Andrew Clarke in Australia, impoverished, unemployed, desperate. Paul de Serville informs me that on October 12, 1853, Standish recorded in his diary, now in the State Library of Victoria, how they talked “over old times at the RMA”. On January 23, 1854, he recorded staying the night at Merri Creek, Andrew’s house, where they “indulged in most pleasing reminiscences of the old days at Woolwich”. Standish had “a shakedown in the drawing room” and “a jolly large tub” the next morning. Andrew promised to urge his claims and successfully assisted him to become Assistant Commissioner at Bendigo. It was a crucial stepping stone. In 1855 Standish was appointed Protector of the Chinese at Bendigo, and in 1857 Warden of the Gold Fields at Sandhurst. The following year he rose even higher. In The People’s Force: A History of the Victoria Police (1986) Robert Haldane quotes Standish’s diary, August 20, 1858: “Heard about 4.30 that I had just been appointed by the Executive to the C.C. of Police.” He was now Chief Commissioner of Police in Victoria, a position he held until 1880.

While at Bendigo, de Serville notes, Standish, although born into a Catholic family, became a freemason. Andrew Clarke may have been an influence here. In his History of the Continent of Australia & the Island of Tasmania (1877) Marcus Clarke records that Andrew Clarke had been appointed grand master of the English Constitution of the Melbourne freemasons in 1857. De Serville notes that Standish became Provincial Grand Master of Victoria in 1861.

Clara Aspinall recorded in Three Years in Melbourne (1862): 

There are many men of good family out in the colony, holding some of the best appointments in Victoria. The Chief Commissioner of Police is Captain Standish, a member of the ancient family of that name in Lancashire … I believe that Standish was one of those who “stand high in public opinion.” 

Perhaps her brother, Butler Cole Aspinall, had not imparted the information to her that he gave to the journalist James Smith, who recorded in his diary, now in the Mitchell Library: 

Captain Standish—my informant adds—is furnished with a report every morning of the number and the names of those who have spent the night in the better class of brothels. The record must be a curious one and calculated to lift the veil from the secret immoralities of many of the outwardly moral and respectable. 

Paul de Serville adds in Pounds and Pedigrees: 

In evidence which was suppressed, the parliamentary committee of inquiry into the police force heard an allegation that Standish had given a dinner at which the women present were naked and their chairs were covered in black velvet the better to show off the whiteness of their skin. 

In Marcus Clarke’s 1865 account of “A Day in Melbourne” which Cyril Hopkins published in his life of Clarke, there is a cameo of Standish playing billiards at the Port Phillip Club Hotel: “See those two men playing now! One is Captain L’Encrier, the Chief Commissioner of Police, and the other is a rich squatter from the Western District. The Captain can beat him easily; see how he plays with him.” Paul de Serville informs me that in his diary Standish recorded dining with Marcus’s uncle, Judge Clarke, a number of times over the years. On December 27, 1865, he dined with Judge Clarke “and his nephew”. And Marcus was one of five men he dined with on March 16, 1866.

In the event, Marcus did not join the mounted police but returned to Melbourne and began a career in journalism on the Argus. In the Melbourne Review (7, 1882) H.G. Turner recalled Clarke’s “faculty of humorous moralizing that made the broadsheet more entertaining; and he early commenced in the columns of The Australasian that series of papers by the ‘Peripatetic Philosopher’, which brought him prominently into notice”. The first column, signed “Q”, appeared on November 23, 1867, to coincide with the arrival in Melbourne of the twenty-three-year-old Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s second son. “Though Bohemian I am loyal,” Q announced the following week, offering some sardonic comments on the celebrations.

To celebrate the royal visit a free banquet was organised in Melbourne, with a whole bullock and twelve sheep barbecued, 900 gallons of colonial wine, and 3452 buns and three hogsheads of ginger beer for children. The outcome was chaos. Brian Elliott records in his biography Marcus Clarke (1958) that the event became “a public scandal … Clarke contented himself with mildly twitting the critics and affecting boredom. Boredom became one of his witty weapons. The Duke of Edinburgh bored him, and the snobbery which the Royal visit excited bored him more.”

Standish was more deeply involved. Curtis Candler recorded in his diary, excerpted in the La Trobe Library Journal (October 1976): 

There was a dreadful fiasco at the “Free Banquet” this afternoon. I was just about starting for it when Standish came in with his eyes filled with dust and in the most filthy state. He told me that the crowd was something fearful, and that the police had lost all control over them. By some unfortunate mismanagement the time of the Prince’s arrival had been altered and the result was the people had got frantic at waiting in the heat and dust, had rushed the tables, and were in the wildest disorder. He had fortunately met the Prince as he was going on the ground, and had taken on himself to intercept him and prevent his going. He said that had he gone, he is quite sure that great loss of life must have ensued. Women and children must have been crushed by the crowd pressing forward to any point the Prince may have gone. Having represented this to HRH he exercised a wise discretion and turned back—delegating to Standish the rather awkward and not very gracious task of announcing that he would not appear to the unruly multitude. Standish says the scene was something grand in its tumult, uproar and confusion. They made a lane for him to the raised dais from which he signified HRH’s intention of not appearing. The announcement was the signal for the wildest disorder. The platform was rushed, and he was nearly being thrown down. His faithful “bobbies”, however, sallied round him and he at last got away …

Standish told me the Duke had received an anonymous letter, warning him against himself—stating that he was a notorious gambler and was associated with disreputable characters on the Turf &c—winding up by saying that the writer did not sign his name because if by accident Capt. S. should learn it, such was his vindictiveness he should not consider his life safe &c. The Duke showed the letter to S. himself. 

Meanwhile, the Prince had other interests to be catered for. De Serville, drawing on Standish’s diary, records: 

Both as Chief Commissioner of Police and as a man of the world, Standish was employed to be of service to the Prince, although the first mentions of the Royal visitor in his diary are almost offhand in tone. The day after the Galatea arrived, two of the Prince’s suite, Lord Newry and Eliot Yorke, dined with Standish at the Club, and afterwards he took them to visit Mrs Fraser. A casual reader might suppose her to be a fashionable Melbourne hostess who gave suppers at London hours. A fashionable hostess of a kind, Mrs Fraser undoubtedly was; she conducted the most sumptuous and well-appointed brothel in Melbourne. 

Prostitution was widespread. The bar of the Royal Hotel adjacent to the Theatre Royal, known as the “saddling paddock”, was the haunt of prostitutes. So were the theatres themselves. In The Golden Age of Australian Opera: W.S. Lyster and His Companies 1861–1880 (1981), Harold Love notes that when Lyster finally enforced the often proclaimed banning of prostitutes from soliciting for custom in the stalls of the Prince of Wales Opera House, he claimed that the prohibition cost the theatre £1500 a year.

In his first Peripatetic Philosopher column Clarke declared of the original peripatetics: 

These ancient flâneurs had a dash of the philosophy of the latter Epicureans. They preferred ease to labour, and a quiet observant walk down Athens to a wrangle with other gentlemen in broiling atria or dingy peristyles. There is much to be learnt from street life, and one’s “daily walks abroad” are instructive as well as amusing. To imitate the ancient peripatetics has long been my pleasure. I am a Bohemian … 

Exploring the city as a theatrical site was something of a nineteenth-century pastime. Walt Whitman kept a notebook recording his observations of New York street scenes. Charles Dickens used to get Wilkie Collins to accompany him around London on such expeditions. In London in 1851, de Serville records, Standish had “toured the slums of St Giles, Westminster, Southwark, and Shoreditch with a detective and found the sights ‘very curious and horrible’”. An anecdote in the Bulletin, August 13, 1881, records of Clarke: 

One peculiar fancy he had was to wander around the city in search of “faces”. The writer has accompanied him on many of these weird pilgrimages, which embraced all quarters of the city—from the slums about Little Bourke Street to the aristocratic precincts of Toorak. In these expeditions, the deceased author’s strangest fantasies were exhibited. For instance, he would pretend to recognize in living members of the lower orders startling portraits of dead-and-gone celebrities, whom he insisted lived again on earth in their persons. Thus a Collingwood bus driver was Julius Caesar, and a barmaid in a Bourke-street hotel the “positive presentment of Cleopatra”. In a like manner he would discover extraordinary beauty in various types of both sexes where none to the ordinary observer existed … 

There was a literary tradition of such explorations, with Eugene Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842–43) and Mayhew’s articles for the Morning Chronicle that became London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Clarke’s explorations of the city in due course bore literary fruit, his three-part series “Night Scenes in Melbourne” appearing in the Argus in 1868. L.T. Hergenhan reprinted it in A Colonial City: High and Low Life. Selected Journalism of Marcus Clarke (1972).

Clarke had expert guidance. He writes in the first article, “Melbourne Streets at Midnight”: “We have recently, with the assistance of the police, penetrated into all these places.” In the third article, “The Chinese Quarter”, he is more specific about his guide: “We need no magic horse or flying carpet to take us into China; all we need do is to turn down Little Bourke-street, and our friend F— S—, once a mandarin, now a distinguished member of the detective force, will point out to us the ‘manners and customs’ of his countrymen.”

F— S— was not Frederick Standish, but most probably Fook Shing, one of Standish’s detectives. Standish’s appointment as Protector of the Chinese at Bendigo in 1855 had given him a familiarity with the Chinese community. Ken Oldis details Fook Shing’s career in The Chinawoman (2008). He was “one of the three headmen appointed by Captain Standish at the Bendigo camps” and a “former secret society leader”. After a period as an informer he “reappeared as a ‘detective’ in the metropolis. He assumed the role on an informal basis before being officially appointed in early 1868.” A notorious gambler, opium addict and dealer, he claimed expenses “spent for opium on inquiries”. Oldis notes that “an embittered colleague described Fook Shing as doing nothing but smoking opium and falling asleep in the detective office”.

Clarke writes: “We commenced our tour of inspection by a visit to a gambling-house. On a word from F— S— we were instantly admitted.” Fook Shing clearly knew the quarter well, taking Clarke to an opium den and then to an eating house: 

The horrible stenches that rolled out of it gave no promise of good entertainment. Our guide, however, seemed to enjoy the odour, and endeavouring to forget the existence of such things as noses, we followed him in … We had hoped that the cookshop would have completed the tour; but F— S— informed us that this was only the aristocratic portion of the city, and requested us to come and see where “poor fellow live”. 

The final stop was at a brothel: 

The faces of the girls were of the most repulsive kind, but some spark of feeling seemed to be left in one of them, who, with some confusion, requested F— to let us know that she was not always “a Chinaman’s woman”. Young girls from the ages of sixteen to twenty are mostly employed in this traffic, and the old Chinaman will contract to keep and clothe them for a certain period. 

Standish’s supervision of the investigation into the murder of one such girl in Melbourne’s Chinatown in 1856 is dealt with in The Chinawoman.

Standish was elected to the Melbourne Club in 1857. He remained a member until his death, taking up permanent residence there when the new club house was completed. In May 1868 Marcus was elected a member. He had the right family connections. Both James Langton Clarke and Andrew Clarke had been elected. It was very much a conservative, upper-class, establishment, rich man’s venue. H.M. Hyndman, visiting in 1869, wrote of it enthusiastically in The Record of an Adventurous Life (1911): 

I have always remembered my sojourn there off and on for two years. I became very intimate with many of its members and I saw from the first what not a few Englishmen coming out to the colony failed unfortunately to recognize, that before the gold fever and spirit of adventure drew them out to Victoria, many of these habitués had seen and enjoyed pretty nearly all that was to be seen and enjoyed of European society. 

In the 1880s Hyndman was to become one of the first English Marxists, founding the Social Democratic Federation, whose members included William Morris before he left to found the Socialist League, and George Bernard Shaw, who left to join the Fabian Society. A wealthy, upper-class Cambridge-educated radical, Hyndman was a model for John Tanner in Shaw’s Man and Superman.

In due course Hyndman reviewed Clarke’s Long Odds for the Argus, and he and Marcus met and, Hyndman records, became “excellent friends”. De Serville informs me that in November 1870 Captain Standish recorded in his diary dining with F.W. Haddon (the editor of the Argus), Clarke, Curtis Candler and Hyndman. Clarke at this time was serializing His Natural Life in the Australian Journal and publishing the “Old Stories Retold” in the Australasian that became Old Tales of a Young Country.

Hamilton Mackinnon wrote in The Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume (1884): 

While thus rapidly rising in the rank of Australia’s litterateurs, Marcus Clarke was to live at a rate far exceeding his income. In other words, he became a member of the Melbourne Club, and tempted by its glitter, threw himself into its extravagant ways with all the force of his impulsive, Bohemian nature;—and, naturally, got involved in debt. From this there was no recourse but to borrow, and so the presence of the usurer was sought. 

When the biography was reprinted in The Austral Edition of the Selected Works of Marcus Clarke (1890) the specific reference to the Melbourne Club was omitted. Mackinnon’s uncle Lachlan Mackinnon, co-proprietor of the Argus, was a club member, but not Hamilton himself.

Mackinnon’s claim is dismissed by Henry Gyles Turner, who was elected a member in 1880. Turner writes in Turner and Sutherland’s The Development of Australian Literature (1898): 

This statement is wholly indefensible. Clarke was a member of the Melbourne Club for a short period, having been elected about six weeks before his marriage; but to talk of the glittering attractions of that abode of all the conservative conventional proprieties having led him astray, is simply preposterous. As a rule young men find its dullness rather oppressive, and certainly it has never given any indications of developing fastness or bohemianism. 

The Melbourne Club may have seemed conservative and conventional to Turner when he was elected in 1880, but it had had a number of members who maintained a more dandyish mode of life. In The Golden Age of Australian Opera Harold Love sketches in something of the background of Melbourne’s upper bohemia: 

In the sixties, among its official and professional classes, many of them sons of respectable families who had come to the colony to escape scandals at home, it possessed a “fast” set of latter-day Regency rakes for whom removal had not served as an incentive to reformation … Sir Redmond Barry, Judge of the Supreme Court, whose elegant neo-classical town house still stands in Clarendon Street, East Melbourne, as a living defiance of everything high-Victorian, was the patron spirit of this group aided by the witty barrister-politicians B.C. Aspinall and R.D. Ireland. 

Marcus’s cousin “spicy Andrew” had belonged to this milieu. So did Andrew’s friend Captain Standish, the Chief Commissioner of Police. So did Standish’s friend Curtis Candler, the Melbourne coroner. All were members of the Melbourne Club except for Ireland, who was a member of the Union Club, as were both Aspinall and Standish. De Serville comments: “In private, Candler belonged to that group of worldly clubmen,” and he describes the nature of the milieu: 

the world of the flâneur, the gourmet, card-player, pillar of the turf, and anecdotalist. They created, in the Melbourne Club, on the lawn at Flemington, picnicking in the Survey Paddock, or watching the opera from the club box, a small refuge from the exigencies of the Antipodes and from the angularities of other colonists, and a place (pale simulacrum of the bow-window of White’s) where they and their friends could spend their free moments in the congenial company of “our lot”. 

Ronald McNicoll records in Number 36 Collins Street: Melbourne Club 1838–1988 (1988): 

Standish and Candler, both living in the club house, were constant users of the library, and it was Standish who persuaded the committee to spend £150, a large sum, on books in August 1865. Mr Mullen submitted a list, and £200 worth were ordered from England. It was Candler who advocated a collection of Australian works for the library, “no matter how inaccurate, or absurd, they may be” (he was possibly thinking of Bonwick) and thus laid the foundation of the club’s fine collection of Australiana. Brough Smyth and Marcus Clarke were probably the first members to present their own literary works to the club. 

Brough Smyth, Secretary and Chief Inspector of Mines in Victoria, had served under Marcus’s cousin Andrew in the 1850s, and in 1878, Vetch notes, was invited by him to India to report on the gold discoveries of the Wynaad valley.

“In 1868 Clarke, in conjunction with some dozen literary friends, started a modest club,” wrote Hamilton Mackinnon in the Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume: 

The Yorick Club is the outcome of the literary and Bohemian—analogous terms in those days—spirits who used then to assemble nightly at the Café of the Theatre Royal to discuss coffee and intellectual subjects. These gatherings grew so large in the course of time that it was found necessary, in order to keep the communion up, to secure accommodation, where the flow of genius, if nothing else, might have full play without the interruption and intrusion from those deemed outside the particular and shining pale. Accordingly a room was rented and furnished in Bohemian fashion, with some cane chairs, a deal table, a cocoa-nut matting and spittoons. In this the first meeting was held, in order to baptize, in characteristic liquid, the club. The meeting in question debated, with the assistance of sundry pewters and pipes—not empty, gentle reader—the subject warmly from the first proposition made by Clarke, that the club should be called “Golgotha”, or the place of skulls, to the last of Carrington’s “Alas, poor Yorick!” which name was accepted as appropriate, and the somewhat excited company adjourned to a late Saturday night’s supper at a midnight eating house, too well known to name. 

In Laughter and the Love of Friends: A Centenary History of the Melbourne Savage Club 1894–1994 and a History of the Yorick Club 1868–1966 (1994) Joseph Johnson writes that letters of invitation were sent to prospective members in early May 1868: 

A club to be composed of literary men and those taking a special interest in literature, art or science has been started. You are requested to allow yourself to be invited as an original member and to put in an appearance at the Club room (over the Punch office) on Saturday evening the 9th inst at 10 o’clock. Yours, Marcus Clarke, Hon. Sec. 

George Gordon McCrae records in “The Golden Age of Australian Literature”:  

It seeming good in later days to relax the qualification clause a little, persons of literary tastes and leanings though not themselves literary came to be admitted within the charmed circle. The stage came to be very fairly represented, the medical profession followed, artists fell in gladly, the journalists we had with our other poor from the beginning, but one day when the name of the Chief Commissioner of Police appeared on the notice board the majority were filled with astonishment and all sorts of questions pertinent to the occasion (if impertinent in themselves) were asked …

The “qualification” still obtaining though in a modified degree, two members, according to my information, were detailed to wait upon the Chief Commissioner (himself a man at once genial and humorous) with the view of ascertaining his qualifications for membership.

The question politely but firmly put, was met at once by the terse and apposite reply, “Gentlemen of the Yorick, am I not the editor of the Police Gazette!”

They had got their answer and that with military promptitude; bowed themselves out and returned to make their report. Soon after, the new member was duly elected. Should any modern doubt the accuracy of this story as given, it might be competent for him to inquire at the club whether at some time during the latter sixties the name of Captain Frederick Charles Standish, Rtd., did not appear upon the roll and thereunder the title of Chief Commissioner of Police. He was a very busy officer and perhaps his visits were like those of the angels, “few and far between”. For myself I may say I never happened to be on the spot when he happened to look in, whether to taste of our curious vintages or to scribble a note on club paper.

Needless to say, the Yorick was a men-only club, and needless to say no one writing about it seems to have felt the need to remark on this. This was they heyday of men’s clubs. And these were the great years of bachelor literature—even if some of the bachelors were married, like Henry Kendall and Adam Lindsay Gordon. Others were yet to be: Clarke in July 1869, George Gordon McCrae in July 1871, Patrick Moloney in 1876. A few, like B.F. Kane, A. Brook Smith and Captain Standish, held out till the end and never married. The Yorick Club was a space where bachelor literature could continue to be celebrated, secure from the invasions of womankind. A safe haven.

Membership of the Melbourne, Union, Yorick, and Athenaeum clubs may have been a necessary part of the Chief Commissioner’s police business. But Standish was undoubtedly a clubman by choice. He certainly gave the appearance of wearing his responsibilities lightly. In Recollections of a Victorian Police Officer (1912) John Sadleir summed up Standish: 

His short service previously in the Royal Artillery did not seem to have left its mark upon him, for he showed few evidences of military training. He belonged to a high-class English county family, had received a liberal education, and possessed many natural gifts that might have placed him in a higher position in public respect and favour than he ever reached. He was a man of wider views than his immediate predecessor and of fairer judgement. I doubt, however, whether he possessed as high a sense of duty. He was too much a man of pleasure to devote himself seriously to the work of his office, and his love of pleasure led him to form intimacies with some officers of like mind, and to think less of others who were much more worthy of regard. 

In “The Difficulties of My Position”: The Diaries of Prison Governor John Buckley Castieau, 1855–1884, edited by Mark Finnane (2004), Castieau records many meetings at the Yorick Club with fellow member Marcus Clarke. July 30, 1872, he records meeting the Chief Commissioner of Police: 

Went to a meeting called for the purpose of establishing a Society for the Aid of Discharged Prisoners. When I went into the room I saw the Dean, a number of clergymen of different denominations and Captain Standish. The Captain hailed me with apparent thankfulness. He said until I came he felt as he were the only sinner in the crowd and that he was entirely out of his element. 

A month later, Castieau records an encounter with Marcus Clarke’s friend the former mounted policeman Walstab at the Yorick: 

Went to the club. Felt my position unpleasantly while there, for I was called out of the room and told I was wanted in the strangers’ room. I went and found Walstab the novelist in charge of a constable who had arrested him for non-payment of his wife’s maintenance. Walstab asked me to tell the Telegraph people of his trouble and I did so, then hastened home so that I might be in time to receive the prisoner when he arrived at the gaol. Left the club with McKinley and on the way home met Mr Panton the police magistrate at Geelong and who was formerly visiting justice at this gaol. Walstab was soon in my custody and I sent him to the cell directing particularly that he should be supplied with clean bedding. I thought it better to do no more than that for him. 

Clarke and Standish were never close friends. But they had a number of acquaintances in common. Clarke was a good friend of Adam Lindsay Gordon; Gordon’s friends Robert and Herbert Power were both members of the Melbourne Club and, de Serville records, Herbert was an old friend of Standish. In A Century Galloped By: The First Hundred Years of the Victoria Racing Club (1988), John Pacini records that the two Power brothers together with Standish and George Watson were at the meeting at Scott’s Hotel in 1864 when the VRC was established, and Herbert Power, Standish and Watson were members of the first committee. Gordon on horseback was the subject of a number of paintings by Thomas Lyttleton, some commissioned by Herbert Power. De Serville writes that when appointed Chief Commissioner of Police “it was symptomatic of Standish’s attitude and priorities that he soon replaced Superintendent S.E. Freeman, the chief officer in the city of Melbourne, with Thomas Lyttleton”. Annie Baxter Dawbin remarked in her diary on April 24, 1862: “Colonel Hadden says Tom Lyttleton is one of the two wildest most dissipated men he ever met.” In her biography of Gordon in the Australasian, December 23, 1933, Eileen Kaye wrote that Captain Standish was among those present at Gordon’s funeral.

The opera producer William Saurin Lyster was another good friend of Clarke’s, and Clarke dedicated Four Stories High to him in 1877. On May 17, 1878, the Argus reported: 

It being known that Mr W.S. Lyster, the well-known impresario, who for 17 years has supplied the Victorian public with opera, is compelled to visit Europe on account of ill-health, a few of his friends met together yesterday to devise the best means of presenting him with some pleasant testimonial of their esteem, of his private worth, and appreciation of his labours on behalf of the musical public. Captain Standish was in the chair, and Clarke and Herbert Power were amongst those present. 

Standish is named in another episode involving Clarke, reported in the Age, June 24, 1878:  

The tele-gastrograph is a machine by which, through the aid of electric currents, the flavor of any food or liquor can be transmitted by wire to any distance, and the sensation of eating or drinking conveyed by merely placing the end of the wire between the teeth. The inventor never pretended that any actual nourishment was conveyed by his process. He merely claimed that the sensation of partaking of rich viands and costly wines could be imparted to people a hundred miles away from the operator—written on their palates, in fact; and that the number who could receive this sensation from a small quantity of food, and the length of time that it could be made to last, were practically unlimited; and after the experiments of last night all doubt as to the correctness of his calculations is at an end. The private trials of his machine on a small scale within the last few weeks satisfied all who witnessed them; but at the request of the inventor public notice was withheld till he had perfected his arrangements so as to give the world an opportunity of judging for itself. It was arranged that at 8 o’clock yesterday evening the experiments were to commence. The machine was worked at the Victoria Club, and a number of well-known gentlemen kindly gave their services to assist the operator. Messrs Ellery and S.W. M‘Gowan took charge of the electric battery. Mr Butters, Mr Sayers, the well-known professor of cookery, Mr Hay, of the Athenæum Club, and Mr Phipps, of Clement’s Café, undertook to see that the soups and food were properly cooked and were kept hot. Dr Bleasdale and Sir Redmond Barry looked after the wines, and Judge Cope and Mr Gatehouse after the beer and spirits; while Mr George Kirk, Mr Reginald Bright, and Captain Standish were in readiness to supervise the arrangements for sending a sensation of cigar smoke along the wire after the dinner was disposed of.

It was another of Clarke’s inventive spoofs. “The credit of inventing the tele-gastrograph is solely and entirely due to a gentleman who has been for some years connected with the literary department of this paper,” the Age explained.

By the 1880s, however, the world had changed—not least for Clarke and Standish. After Judge Clarke retired from the bench and settled in Nice, Sir Redmond Barry was the nearest approximation to a family figure and patron for Marcus. Mackinnon in the Memorial Volume remarks on “the interest Sir Redmond Barry evinced in the rising litterateur, whom he took under his parental wing, when obtaining for him the secretaryship of the Public Library” in 1870. When, on October 28, 1880, Clarke applied for the post of Librarian at the Melbourne Public Library, it was in expectation of the support of Barry, who was chairman of the library’s board of trustees.

Then came the trial of Ned Kelly. Kelly’s defence counsel, Howard Bindon, had been proposed for membership of the Yorick Club by Clarke in 1872. Sir Redmond Barry was the judge who sentenced Kelly to death. “I will see you there where I go!” Kelly promised Barry. On November 23, 1880, Barry died, twelve days after Kelly was executed. Clarke, Mackinnon records, “on hearing of Sir Redmond’s death, expressed himself as having lost his best and most influential friend”. Clarke was not appointed librarian. In debt, his creditors pressing for payment, he declared bankruptcy, and as a consequence had to tender his resignation from the library. Less than two weeks later, on August 2, 1881, he died.

Captain Standish was also in difficulties. As a consequence of two years of police failures in dealing with the Kelly gang, the Berry government forced him to retire in 1880. Friends arranged for him to become chairman of the Victoria Racing Club, a position he held until his death at the Melbourne Club on March 13, 1883. De Serville quotes his obituary from the Australasian, on March 24: 

When in the full vigour of his health, Captain Standish was credited with the possession of considerable ability as an administrator, but during his closing years he evidenced a loss of firmness which resulted in the police force falling into a state of disorder. This became painfully manifest during the Kelly outbreak, when the conduct of the pursuit was carried out in a manner which led to severe reflections being cast on the higher officers of the force. 

In his history of the Victoria Racing Club, John Pacini quotes from another obituary: 

He loved to gamble and lost a good deal of money … It would be no exaggeration to say he was among the most knowledgeable and experienced racing men in Australia. Some years before becoming a foundation member of the VRC at Creswick’s inaugural meeting he had been very much a driving force in the old Victoria Turf Club, one of the two racing clubs the VRC absorbed. The Melbourne Cup was entirely his idea. He had held almost every post there was to hold in the VRC—Committeeman, Handicapper, Steward, Treasurer and finally Chairman, to say nothing of being the Club’s most skilful race and programme framer. 

The VRC runs the annual Standish Handicap in his honour to this day. 

Michael Wilding latest books are a novel The Magic of It (Arcadia/Press On) and Wild & Woolley: A Publishing Memoir (Giramondo). His Wild Bleak Bohemia: Marcus Clarke, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry Kendall—A Documentary is forthcoming from Australian Scholarly Publishing in August. He wrote on “Marcus Clarke’s Essential Recycling” in the November 2011 issue.