General News
10 April, 2026
Josiah and Priscilla Bean with Val Dwyer
Local resident Betty Alexander was married to my brother Michael Alexander.
Betty is the great granddaughter of Josiah and Priscilla Bean.
Josiah at the age of 23, travelled to Australia from England with his brother Charles on the doomed ship, the Earl of Charlemont.
Josiah the youngest of six children was born in Stutton near Leeds in Yorkshire. Both his parents died when he was young and he was raised by his sister Jane, a resourceful and practical woman of high ideals, determination and character. Her influence left an indelible mark on Josiah and many of his descendants.
Josiah and Charles came to Australia to search for gold. The Earl of Charlemont, a three-masted sailing ship of 871 tons, left England on March 13, 1853 carrying 450 passengers.
Approaching Barwon Heads Victoria, three months later on June 17, the vessel struck rocks.
The sea was calm on a bright moonlit night. The crew and passengers were safely landed ashore except for one who died of shock.
After two lifeboats had been smashed to pieces, one brave passenger volunteered to swim ashore with a light rope and fixed a strong hawser between the ship and the shore.
Josiah and Charles waited for the tide to recede and swam and waded ashore. They and all the other passengers lost all they possessed.
On shore fires were lighted. A stray bullock was killed and roasted. Several people died of exhaustion and exposure. A baby was born.
The shipwrecked immigrants were cared for by the local community, and the women and elderly men taken by bullock drays to Geelong.
The citizens of Geelong raised £1000 to assist the victims of the disaster.
The Earl of Charlemont had become a total wreck. A local newspaper interviewed one of the passengers who said, “The night was clear, Saddle Rock on land was clearly seen, we seemed to be rushing towards certain destruction.”
The press reported that wrecks were occurring all the time and condemned the practice of building and chartering unseaworthy ships, which were sent to their inevitable doom for the purpose of claiming insurance.
I am comparing my family’s voyage from Scotland via Liverpool in England, on the renovated warship The Georgic as migrants in 1949. We were ensconced in luxury for a month, compared with the passengers’ three months on the Earl of Charlemont in 1853.
Free of the shipwreck, Josiah and Charles headed for Geelong. Charles settled and died there. Josiah trekked on to Woods Point, then to the Red Hill gold mine at Chewton, near Castlemaine where he stayed about two years and won about £2000 worth of gold.
When Josiah’s son Herbert visited Stutton in England in 1904, he met Rose, the sweetheart of Josiah’s youth. She still had the brooch containing the first gold nugget he had won and sent to her in England with a proposal of marriage.
Josiah talking of his memories of the gold rush to his children and grandchildren used to say that the diggers were generally men of high character, often misunderstood and tyrannized by officialdom.
After the gold rush subsided Josiah embarked on a flour milling business, but this was terminated when the mill was destroyed by fire.
Josiah’s father Richard Bean, was married to Elizabeth Dawes. The Beans were flour millers in Tadcaster, Yorkshire, England
Josiah and Priscilla Reed were married at Ballarat on June 1, 1859. They lived at Sebastopol and Miner’s Rest.
Pricilla’s parents were Cornish, but she was born in Waterford, Ireland, while her father Nicholas Reed a civil engineer, was there building bridges. The Reed family migrated to Adelaide in South Australia in 1849.
Josiah now turned his hand to farming at St Arnaud in the Mallee. His unsuccessful efforts were hampered by the lack of machinery and irrigation.
In the early 1880s, Josiah and Priscilla and their family of six children moved to Melbourne, where Josiah became successfully involved in the building boom, followed by the disastrous depression of 1892-3. It was an economic nightmare. Australia’s population was only three million.
Malnutrition and starvation was rife. The wealthy became poverty stricken overnight and many found it impossible to provide an 1893 Christmas meal for their families. ‘Sweat Shops’ abounded.
The Beans were sincere Christians and protected and guided their children through the following years. Josiah and Priscilla lived for their children and grandchildren. Josiah was physically active to within four days of his death in his 81st year on September 5, 1910.
Centenary Reunion 1953
On Saturday, November 14, 1953 Betty Alexander (nee Grant) and her father and sister Joy, attended a reunion of Josiah and Priscilla’s descendants held in Barwon Heads, commencing with a thanks giving service at All Saints Church of England, followed by the unveiling of a cairn on the cliffs.
The unveiling was followed by a celebratory dinner at the banquet hall of the A.B.C. Café Geelong.
The anchor from the Earl of Charlemont is on the foreshore at Barwon Heads and the bell is in front of the Church of England.
One of Josiah and Priscilla Bean’s daughters was named Priscilla (1872-1939) after her mother. She married William Grant in 1904 and one of their sons Sydney Grant (1905-1961) was Betty Alexander’s father.