Lucinda Musgrave
For example, in August 1850, when she was 16, she accompanied the Moby-Dick author Herman Melville and fellow writers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. on a hike and picnic up Monument Mountain in Massachusetts, then joined them for dinner at her father’s summer home in Stockbridge in the evening.
In the speech at the reception to mark the Governor’s return to British Columbia with his new wife, hope was expressed that her being American would strengthen bilateral bonds with the US as the colony was joining the newly-formed Canadian Confederation.
[14][15] He and Lucinda arrived in Natal in September 1872 after what one report described as “five chequered and gloomy years” of administration by his predecessor, winning praise for his tact, good judgement and a lack of formality.
[19] Not long after the couple arrived to a relatively low-key welcome in the South Australian capital, Adelaide, in June 1873,[20] In a speech delivered on her behalf by Musgrave, she expressed her determination to join not only the “social pleasures and duties” of being the Governor’s wife, but also “the sorrows and griefs” of the community in which she was living.
Notably, she made no mention of Aboriginal South Australians, instead stressing the worthiness of an institution set up to help elderly colonists from Britain who had “endured hardships and privations” as “early settlers”.
Her husband’s appointment had proved popular, with the South Australian parliament showing its satisfaction by commissioning a new government steamer named The Governor Musgrave.
On October 9 1874, Lucinda’s 41st birthday, three-year-old Joyce Harriet Musgrave accidentally fell into a bath of hot water being prepared by her nurse.
The couple continued official and social duties in South Australia without controversy until news came through in late 1876 of another promotion for him, this time to be Governor of Jamaica.
In her address, she said she was taking away two children born in Adelaide who must always have a personal interest in their birthplace, and to her the city would always be “inexpressibly dear” to her, a probable reference to it being the burial place of her daughter, Joyce.
[32] Her father would visit Jamaica in 1880 and go with Lucinda into the rugged hills of St Andrew, overlooking Kingston city and harbour, where she and her family sought refuge from the summer heat in a vine-covered cottage called Flamstead.
[35] To women who provided certificates of commendation from their local clergymen, the Society offered six months of free classes in needlework and straw-plaiting, if they didn’t have other craft skills.
In a formal address on the eve of her departure in April 1883, the committee of the Society in Kingston told Lucinda that “sad hearts have been cheered by your kindness, bitter needs relieved by your charity, dark lives brightened by your thoughtful wisdom”[37] Hundreds of members of the Society in the outer district of Portland would sign a statement expressing similar sentiments.
For example, within months of her agreeing to become patron of a safe maternity facility for women in Maryborough, enough funds had been raised for the new “Lady Musgrave Lying-In Hospital” to begin receiving patients.
[48][49][50] After a few months of operation, girls who had stayed at the Lodge had found employment as general servants, housemaids, nurses, dressmakers and shop assistants.
When he made his last overseas trip against doctors’ advice to see her and her sons in 1894, they had finished their studies at Harrow, and she had moved to a 400-year-old house called “Hurst-an-Clays” at East Grinstead in Sussex.
[66][67] In April 1895, Lucinda was struck by tragedy again, with the loss of a second child, Dudley, who died of typhoid fever in Bombay (now Mumbai) as a Navy midshipman, aged 21.
Her youngest son, Herbert, born in Adelaide in 1875, would be killed in action in France as an army major in June 1918, leaving behind a wife (nee Georgiana Hopkins) and two children – one called Jeanie Lucinda Musgrave, after her grandmother.
[82] Although the Society had initially catered primarily for poor members of Jamaica’s minority white and “coloured” communities,[83] it was later seen as having helped to raise international awareness of Jamaican craft skills, including those based on African artwork.
[84] At the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London in 1886, for example, the Society’s display included items made of African lace-bark work, and a traditional Afro-Caribbean clay cooking pot, a yabba.
[85] The Society was also seen as an agent for change as it exposed many Jamaican women to organised mass movements for the first time, ahead of later campaigns for political, educational and legal rights for all communities.
[86] In Australia, the Lady Musgrave Trust, originating from the Lodge, remained in operation in 2020, describing itself as “Queensland’s oldest charity and a champion for homeless women”.
[87] In Britain, a report about Lady Musgrave and her support for the Anti-suffrage League would be used in the 21st Century in online educational materials for students learning about British history.
[88] In addition to the township of Lucindale in South Australia, there is also a town called Lucinda near Ingham in Queensland, and there is a Lady Musgrave Island near the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef.
