The talented Mr Stephen

This is an out-take that didn't fit my upcoming The Big(ger) Book of Australian History.  The work began with The Big Book of Australian History, which went through four editions under the National Library of Australia's imprint. but as they have hesitated too long, I am going my own way, though the title will now be Australia: a social history.

The odd original title reflects that this version is 2.5 times the size of the original version. Soon, I will be seeking a publisher...

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The colony of South Australia was 15 years old in 1851, but the population was disappearing as all the young and fit men, rushed off to hunt for gold in Victoria. Adelaide could not afford to lose its most capable workers, and so the saga of Mitchell’s Flat started, following the offer of £1000 in the South Australian Register on 17 December 1851 ‘…for the purpose of rewarding the discoverers of productive gold-fields…’

South Australians knew Australia’s first gold mine had been in their colony, so now they began looking harder, for more gold. George Milner Stephen was a gifted man, a member of a powerful family of lawyers and judges, and probably too clever for his own good, which may explain why and how he became involved in a scandal.

He may have been trapped by others because he was too trusting, but his later history makes it more likely that he was in the original plot, up to his neck. His family was notable for its brilliance and also for its long history of instability and living on the edge.

His brother had a convict mistress in Sydney and helped her to escape to New Zealand. Another member of the family was a judge who became insane during a famous British murder trial, yet another was a suspect in the ‘Jack the Ripper’ case, while Virginia Woolf (née Stephen), filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself.

George Milner Stephen clearly thought he could fool people. This first ‘game’ may not have been a fraud: he was never in a position to make money from it, and somebody else may have been the hoaxer, but he was certainly a fraudulent quack later on. On 29 December, 1851, Charles Bonney and Herschel Babbage, both Government Commissioners, were taken by five men, including Mr Stephen, a sharebroker named Edmund Freeman, and Freeman’s lawyer, to the Mount Lofty Ranges, outside Adelaide.

Bonney and Babbage reported to the Colonial Secretary on 30 December, and the South Australian Register had the news the next day, New Year’s Eve. They had just one spade and one pan, but after ten washings, they had found gold in the pan, every time—but that was not necessarily the same thing as finding gold on the site.

If there had been several pans, it would have been far harder for one person to add gold to each pan, and without any doubt, some sort of addition took place. Babbage and Bonney advised the government against selling any of the land in the area, hinting that somebody had played a few tricks.

Still, the South Australian Register mentioned that the locality was on a tributary of the Onkaparinga River, where gold had been found some years earlier, and that ‘…those who make Mitchell’s Flat their destination will not be very far out.’

Then, as now, New Year’s Day was a holiday, and the Register said on 3 January 1852, that 400 to 500 people headed for Mitchell’s Flat. They found no gold, and before long, some of them must have been wishing that Mr Stephen or the Commissioner of Crown Lands was there to show them where to look.

One of the men in the original party, Galbraith by name, had recently returned from Mount Alexander so he could have supplied the planted gold. He may have been a part of the fraud, but he may also have been innocent. Galbraith was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald as saying a friend had said that the find was Mount Alexander gold,

…which belief was confirmed through the course of the day by the man himself confessing, that one of Mr. Stephen’s party placed the gold in the pan for him.
— Sydney Morning Herald, 7 February 1852, 3.

The Herald quoted the editor of the Morning Chronicle as saying Stephen had:

…addressed a note to him in which he, Mr. G. M. Stephen says, ‘that this man, Buckland, put the piece of gold in the pan to play off a practical joke.’

Already, people had their suspicions, but Stephen was said to be out looking for gold and could not be found to be questioned. On his return on 8 January, he said he was personally convinced, or else why had he been out seeking for more gold? He had spent money on the search, and even tried to buy blocks of land there.

In passing, he mentioned Freeman’s former business partner, a Mr Galbraith, who had recently returned from Mount Alexander. Babbage said that Stephen had gone back to prospect in a hole from which Charles Bonney had apparently taken gold on 29 December—and failed to find any. Either Stephen genuinely expected to find gold there, or he was cunningly covering his tracks.

Then the Sydney Morning Herald picked up the tale, and a new name appeared, that of a man called Buckland. Soon after, Stephen and Galbraith claimed to have learned that Buckland had played a practical joke, which is probably true, at least in part. The angry Adelaideans who had sweated on New Year’s Day were not amused.

But was Buckland alone in the hoax (or fraud)? Somebody arranged to take just one spade and one pan. That person wanted to control things, and was a guilty party, probably the guilty party. Sadly, we will never know who it was. Another piece of evidence for the innocence of Mr Stephen comes from a comment passed by Herschel Babbage in his report, written on 8 January 1852.

Babbage was no fool: he was the son of Charles Babbage, the 19th century pioneer of mechanical computers, and he assisted his father in that work. He bore the name of his father’s good friend, the astronomer Sir John Herschel. The son had worked with the famous engineer of Victorian Britain, Isambard Kingdom Brunel on planning railways in Italy, and Babbage’s report on sanitation in the town of Haworth, written at the request of Patrick Brontë, the father of those Brontës, led to massive changes there. He was, as they say, connected—and bright.

So naturally, Babbage was chosen in 1851 as just the person to undertake a mineralogical and geological survey of South Australia. This was just at the start of scientific specialisation, and any scientist was still expected to be able to do all sorts of things—even though the word ‘scientist’, coined in 1841, was not widely used. Babbage, the man of science, did not mince his words, and they were of sufficient interest for them to be reprinted in Sydney, several weeks later on 28 January 1852.

It rests then between Mr. George Milner Stephen and his constituents to point out the parties who have, by the introduction of pieces of gold into the soil washed upon the previous occasion, attempted to mislead the Government and the public.
— The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 January 1852, 2.

Babbage seems to be saying, by implication, that Stephen was not the guilty party. The same Sydney Morning Herald article went on to quote a statement made by Freeman, generally protesting his innocence, but mentioning two key names: Buckland and Galbraith.

…I have since the day above-mentioned seen gold washed and dug out of the soil at Mitchell’s Flat, by one Buckland, on two occasions—one being in the presence of one T. N. Mitchell, and one in the presence of a working man belonging to a party fitted out by Mr. Milner Stephen; and I have also seen two pieces of gold there dug and washed out of the soil, in the presence of Messrs. Penman and Davie, by one Mr. Galbraith…

The guilty party was lucky, and the affair was dismissed as just a hoax, and it may indeed have been no more than a prank that got out of hand. A few years later, Stephen claimed that his find had been real, and was an outlying part of the Echunga field, but nobody took very much notice.

In early 1870, Stephen invented a ‘Gold and Diamond Cradle Amalgamator’. Later in the year, he followed that up with a ‘cheap and portable hammer quartz-crushing battery’. These were praised by others, but the clever Mr Stephen, also an accomplished artist and musician, may not have been quite the innocent he pretended to be. From 1880 until his death in 1894, George Milner Stephen had a flourishing practice as a mesmeric or spiritualist healer, using what he called the “red flannel cure”, because he used red flannel in his treatments.

Here the author must emerge briefly as a player. I have experience both as a perpetrator of hoaxes (for non-fraudulent purposes), and also in fraud investigation, catching genuine crooks. I gave up that trade for the safer alternative of teaching teenage boys, but catching frauds and keeping a lid on bright young minds are both professions that require confidence and the ability to make the “marks” believe what you need them to believe.

On one occasion, I only survived a fraud investigation unscathed because I played the part of Mr Bean so hard that the malefactors, who had broken the arm of one colleague and threatened another with a pistol, ignored me as harmless, when I turned up to ask questions. We knew there was fraud going on, but not how it was being worked. I needed data that I could feed to a computer, and once we had that in a spreadsheet, we knew who was behind it. Dismissing me as a numpty, they gave me the evidence we needed, confident that I was an idiot, and we nailed them. My point is this: I know when something has the wrong smell, and the tale that follows reeks of deception, as I will show in my comments.

Picture a train in April, 1880, travelling from Melbourne to Sandhurst (Bendigo, today). Captain and Mrs Organ, of Prahran are in the saloon carriage, clearly respectable people. A man, apparently an invalid, is carried in by two men, one dressed as a clergyman, and they lay him out on a seat.

A third man is present, Max Kreitmayer, and I will say something of his profession later, because it was he who wrote to The Argus to tell of the events that unfolded. He said the invalid explained that he had been thrown out of a buggy some two months earlier, that a week previously he took a Turkish bath, and in walking afterwards in Collins street staggered and fell, and had lost the use of his legs. Notice all the irrelevant detail, designed to distract the reader? The key point came next: the man was going to Castlemaine to get buried or cured, as his friends lived there. Kreitmayer purported to test this claim:

I gave one of his legs a good pinch, and he assured me that he did not feel it, and consequently I put his case down as a decided case of paralysis. I noticed that when he wished to raise himself a little he had to hold on to the rack above, and on several occasions I lifted the legs off and on the couch, to change his position…
— Argus, 8 May 1880, 8.

So we have an amateur diagnosis, stated as fact, and now the scene is set. The innocents (the Organs) are in place to act as witnesses: cue the miracle worker!

At Gisborne station, Mr George Milner Stephen (whom I knew by sight many years ago) entered the carriage, and had to sit close to the sick man for want of room. He offered his rug, to insure more comfort, and naturally asked what was the matter. The man repeated his story, and Mr Stephen, in a decided tone said, “I can cure you.”

Kreitmayer described how Milner Stephen began his treatment, and notice how the allegedly sick man is now “the patient”—like subliminal advertising, this slips beneath your guard, unless you are looking for it.

My curiosity was aroused to fever heat, and I watched events. Mr Stephen asked the patient to lie on his face, and after making a few passes and breathing on the supposed injured spot, he told him “to rise,” which summons he obeyed with slight success, and he dropped on the seat again, saying that the pain seemed considerably less. He then rose and walked…

Amazing! Hallelujah! Hosanna! (and any other cry that will get the innocent “marks” excited!). Stephen repeated the process and told the man “rise and walk across the carriage.” The man did so and returned to his place without any support.

In 34 minutes after leaving Gisborne, at Kyneton, I left the carriage for a few minutes, and on returning, to my astonishment the patient had gone. Looking out, I found him on the platform, walking about very carefully, and on arrival at Castlemaine, he took his luggage and walked away. Altogether the affair has been so vividly impressed upon my mind, that I can recall the most trifling conversation or incident on this ever memorable journey.

The writer signed himself this way: “MAX. L. KREITMAYER, Waxworks, Bourke-street, May 1”. A cynic might say: how curious that nobody seems to have noticed that Kreitmayer was a good showman himself!

With that spectacular launch, Stephen was off and running. His “cure” was effected by breathing on people through a piece of red flannel, and while a few believed in him, others knew him of old and had their doubts about the aging faith-healer. But was Stephen genuinely convinced he had “the power”? He was no goose, but he may have had delusions of gander.

Others had no doubts at all: two years after Stephens’ death, a coroner was summing up in the case of Honora Judd who died in Melbourne after being attended by a “Professor” Davis, another fraud. The coroner railed against ignorant people who went to quacks, and cited the case of an intelligent journalist whose arm had been hurt by lightning. He had consulted Milner Stephen and his red flannel, and imagined an improvement, “…but soon found his mistake out.”

Flannel was always a favourite folk and quack remedy, long before Milner Stephen. Even John Wesley recommended flannel, though as usual, he offered a whole range of other remedies, in this case, his treatments for chilblains included flannel socks, chamois leather socks and a poultice of onions. Colin Mackenzie, on the other hand, thought flannel good to deal with consumption: the flannel might even prevent the disease altogether!

A complete suit of flannel, worn next the skin, is an indispensable article for every one who is even inclined to this most fatal disorder.
— Colin Mackenzie, Mackenzie’s Ten Thousand Receipts in all the useful and domestic arts, 127.