|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
On the 9th. of
October 1813 convict Robert Cooper arrived in the Earl Spencer at the colony of New South Wales. He had been
transported for the crime of smuggling luxury items such as raw silk
and ostrich feathers into England. His rather naive defence "that he
was only smuggling", failed to save him from a 14 year sentence of
transportation to New South Wales.
Robert Cooper was born in London in
1777, son of another Robert Cooper and his wife Eliza. Not many
details are known but it appears that he came from a family of
distillers and hotel keepers in the Stepney district of London. The
family owned a pub The White Swan, or as locally known, the "Paddy's
Goose". A distillery in nearby Juniper Street was also probably owned
by the Cooper Family.
While Robert Cooper no doubt would
have preferred to remain in London with his wife Mary Ann and their 5
children, he came to conditions more favourable than he could have
imagined. The Governor of the penal settlement, Lachlan Macquarie,
actively encouraged emancipated convicts to remain in the colony and
work for the benefit of the colony, as well as for themselves. After
five years in the colony he was granted a conditional pardon and
started a shop. He advertised himself as being 'in George Street,
opposite the Burial Ground'.
He formed a business association
with his name-sake Daniel Cooper, also a former convict but no
relation, and another merchant Solomon Levey. Robert Cooper was known
as 'Big Cooper', because of his enormous size, or sometimes as 'Black
Bob' because of his thick black hair. The three men bought a small
vessel and started trading to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). Robert
Cooper was granted an auctioneer's licence and by 1829 his business
activities included flour milling, bread making, cedar cutting and
cloth weaving. But his most lucrative business was distilling
'Cooper's Best Gin'. The development of "home distillation" was set a
high priority by Macquarie.
Robert Cooper had three wives (in
succession), and was said to have had 28 children, seven from his
first two wives (Mary Ann and Elizabeth Kelly), and fourteen by his
third wife, Sarah May. However as common in those days, a number of
these children did not survive infancy.
It is said that "Big Cooper"
promised his young bride Sarah May (he was 26 years her senior), the
finest house in Sydney, and so built with his growing proceeds,
Juniper Hall. Juniper Hall was built on an elevated and
windswept site in then rural Paddington. And it still stands there
today, displaying the evidence of its early colonial origins and a
variety of occupations down through the years.
Robert and Sarah were married on
the 29th. of January 1822, in St. Phillip's Church
of England, Sydney. Sarah made it her business to see that her
children were not affected by the emancipist tag, seeing that they
were all well educated, and eventually taking them to Europe and to
schools in London and Paris.
When Robert Cooper died on the
26th of May 1857, he was both a prosperous and
respected man.
The creators of these web pages are descended from Sarah's 5th child, Alexander Edwin Henry Cooper (born 16th of April 1829), the only son of Robert Cooper's third marriage to have male issue and so carry on the name Cooper from that marriage.
References: Robert Cooper of Juniper Hall, Robert S. Cameron, Woollahra, 1986, ISBN 1 86252 128 X
Australians from Everywhere, Bay Books, Sydney, ISBN 0 85835 915 4
Juniper Hall Paddington, National
Trust NSW, 1988, ISBN 0 947137 24 6
