Levy - Laurence Green Laurence February 20

Murray Laurence
JACOB (JAMES)
LEVY/LAURENCE
&
SARAH GREEN/LAURENCE
MURRAY LAURENCE
RESEARCH LEIGH ETHERDEN
FOR ALANA CRUZ LAURENCE

Born 17 March 2017
3rd Edition August 2019
1
Murray Laurence
PREAMBLE: HISTORY AND IDENTITY

Researching the history of one family leads to an exploration of 18th and 19th century Jewish diasporas
and identity – the impact of conversion and radical assimilation on individuals and families – the
mysterious, patriarchal cabal of the Levites and the lure of DNA – the age of revolution and wars of
liberation in South America – life, culture, politics, class and race in places as varied as Livorno,
London, New Orleans, New York and Sydney – the characteristics, both familiar and strange, of our
protagonists – and their final transoceanic journey in 1853 and subsequent settlement in Australia
EXPLORING THE LIVES OF JACOB (JAMES) LEVY/LAURENCE AND SARAH GREEN/LAURENCE and
the journeys they made, physical, psychological and emotional, allows us to contemplate
whether we share, not only their genes and entwined roots of ancestry, but some phantom
residue of their spirit, courage and ambition, as well as their imperfections.
Those of us who are interested in the history of our families are curious to know the
‘kind of people our founding mothers and fathers were, and how the social conditions here and
in their home countries influenced their actions and their very beings’ – in order to identify
influences which contributed to the people and families we are today and the societies to which
we belong.1 We are made by this history and so moved to reflect on those who remained where
they came from and those who departed, each seeing people ‘who were close to them disappear
over the horizon.’2 And we are fortunate if documents have been retained and some of the story
unearthed and chronicled by curious relatives. But we are aware, too, that we explore in a no-
man’s-land between the real lives of our ancestors, those lives invented by them and their
descendants, for purposes necessary, devious or reckless, and the lives that we can imagine and
reconstruct.
Such history is important to people who accept that their identity is in part defined by
family, and, by stimulating research into the wider social, political, economic and geographical
environments in which our ancestors lived, it enhances our appreciation of who they were,
these people who bequeathed life to us. As well, family history benefits professional historians
who seek a more comprehensive understanding of societies through revelations about people
who otherwise would be lost without trace.3
1
Everil Taylor, The History of the Cory Family, 1994. She continues, ‘As I met people who
had never contemplated leaving the environment from which they had sprung, I learned
something of what Australian historian Manning Clark referred to as the “divided ghost”.
Those who remained live among their ancestors whose spirits are in their houses, their
churches, their burial grounds, their villages and the fields they till. Those who left to “turn
the sod” in a new and undeveloped land, and bestowed their genes on those of us who are
their descendants, had sensed some necessity to “set their life on any chance”, and as a result
had been tempered afresh by experiences unimaginable to those they left behind.’
2
‘Ours is the century of enforced disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing
others who were close to them disappear over the horizon.’ About the 20th century, but
entirely applicable to the 19th. John Berger.
3
‘The past matters because we give it a life; because we seek to understand both its
difference from the present and the traces of commonality that bind us to the lives of those
who have gone before us.’ Mark McKenna, ‘Moment of Truth. History and Australia’s
Future’, Quarterly Essay, Issue 69, 2018.
James and Sarah Laurence 2

Murray Laurence
James and Sarah Laurence are just two of countless forebears we all have, two of the
millions who migrated across countries and oceans seeking opportunities, who fled disaster,
turmoil, persecution, crime and poverty, or who were enslaved or indentured during what
historian Eric Hobsbawm calls the Age of Revolution, an era when British industrial capitalism
and military power achieved global hegemony, buttressed by burgeoning Anglo-Saxon race
pride. They were just two of the thousands who migrated to Australia in that period.
When Jacob Levy was born in 1796, the colony of NSW, his final home, was just eight
years old; James Cook’s voyage along the east coast of this ancient land had taken place in
1770, his landing in Botany Bay on 29 April signifying that ‘the seal of distance and space that
had protected the east coast of Australia since the Pleistocene epoch was broken. The
colonisation of the last continent had begun.’4 It is hard to imagine that at that time the Levys
would have had any apprehension of the fact that one of their children would one day, late in
middle age, and after many long journeys, settle on this far side of the Earth, and harder still to
so imagine for Sarah’s unknown family.
The wonder inspired by New World exploration would intensify as Alexander von
Humboldt led his grand ‘New Continent’ expedition from 1799 to 1804 through much of South
America, from the boundless, mysterious Amazon to the eternal snows of Mount Chimborazo,
revealing extraordinary natural riches, establishing modern geography and ecology – in South
America nature powerfully demonstrated its ‘natural connection’ – so transforming science and
science writing.5 Humboldt also encouraged the young Venezuelan Simon Bolivar to think
anew about the vast potential of his continent unshackled from its colonial overlords.
Between 1804 and 1806 the Lewis and Clark expedition was the first to cross from the
eastern United States through the vast territories of the Louisiana Purchase to the northwest
Pacific coast, the wonder of discovery promising limitless opportunity and, inevitably, calamity
for Native Americans, as expansion, warfare and settlement followed.
The industrial revolution, which would exacerbate the conditions of the poor, while
hugely improving those of the moneyed classes, gathered pace in Britain in the late 18th and
early 19th centuries. The United States of America had been independent for two decades before
Levy’s birth, the French revolution had begun in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille and the
first republic established in 1792, so beginning Europe’s revolutionary wars. The colossal
disruptions of the Napoleonic era provided new opportunities for London’s City merchants and
financiers, scions of our families amongst them, to increase their share of global trade and
associated financial activity and reach. In 1808 revolts against Spain erupted in Central and
South America; eleven independent states were created by 1826, many following the earth-
shaking campaigns of Simon Bolivar.
These were among the epochal events occurring during Jacob Levy’s early years which
would directly or indirectly determine his directions and horizons, and so the lives of his wife
and children, and, inevitably, our own.
4
Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore.
5
‘In the mists of the rapids of the Orinoco, rainbows danced in a game of hide-and-seek –
optical magic, as he called it.’ Humboldt ‘conjured up the quiet solitude of the Andean
mountaintops and the fertility of the rainforest, as well as the magic of a meteor shower …’
Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature, The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt.

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CONTENTS
Preamble: history and identity 2
1. Jacob/James Levy/Laurence and Sarah Green 5
2. Family Background: Levys and Montefiores; ‘Laurence’ appears, radical assimilation

follows 5
3. Sephardim in London and the world 10
4. A One Thousand and One Arabian Nights tale and a DNA detour into the cabal of the
Levites 15
5. Zaccaria Levy’s death and will 18
6. Adventuring in South America and the Caribbean with Jayme Lister – overview 19
7. Adventuring in South America and the Caribbean with Jayme Lister – detail 23
8. Marriage of James Lister Laurence and Sarah Henrietta Green in Mexico 33
9. Birth of James Frederick in Tampico and travel to the United States 34
10. The growing Laurence family in New York, Caracas and New Orleans 35
11. Simha Levy/Laurence’s death and will 39
12. Journey to Australia 40
13. Life in New South Wales 42
14. James Laurence’s death 48
15. Sarah Laurence’s death 49
Epilogue: an uncharted voyage, a turbulent century 50
Endnotes 54
Ithaka 61
References 61

Murray Laurence
1. JACOB/JAMES LEVY/LAURENCE AND SARAH GREEN
JACOB LEVY, FOREBEAR OF AN EXTENSIVE CLAN OF LAURENCES IN AUSTRALIA, and my great-

great grandfather, was born in Stamford Hill, Middlesex, north London, on 11 December
1796.6 By the time he landed in Sydney on 16 August 1853 he was named James Lister
Laurence. He was baptised a Christian at St Mary’s Walthamstow on 5 February 1813 at the
age of 16, being christened James Levy.7 He was known as Jayme Lister during the years he
was in South America and became James Lister Laurence just before he married Sarah Green
in Mexico in 1835.8
Sarah Henrietta Green is said to have been born in Leeds, Kent, England in 1819.
Women begin with a disadvantage in historical research. Because they normally acquire their
husband’s surname they soon vanish, as do those who don’t marry. In our great-great
grandmother’s case there is very little information – all we have is her death certificate; and
some decades after the end of her eventful life as child, wife and mother, she is simply brushed
into obscurity when the time comes to celebrate the lives of her sons in obituaries.9
From James’s birth in 1796 until Sarah’s death in 1891 is a near century encompassing
their long, challenging and fulfilling voyage across a great arc of time and space.
2. FAMILY BACKGROUND: LEVYS AND MONTEFIORES; ‘LAURENCE’ APPEARS,

RADICAL ASSIMILATION FOLLOWS
JACOB LEVY’S PARENTS WERE ZACCARIA LEVY AND SIMCHA HANNAH MONTEFIORE.10
Zaccaria is said to have been born in Venice, although that is contested, on 10 June 1751, one
of at least four children of Abraham and Esther Levy.11 Simha was born in Worlington, Suffolk
on 15 February 1767, the 12th child of Moses Vita Montefiore and Esther Hana Racah who
both came from prominent Livorno, Italy, based families. Zaccaria and Simha Levy had nine
children: Justina born 23 May 1788, Zaccaria 13 June 1789, John 20 June 1790, Joseph 27 May
1791, Benjamin 21 June 1794, Sarah 15 July 1795 (died in infancy), Jacob 11 December 1796,
6
The family tree of Joseph Levy/Laurence’s family confirms that James was registered at
birth at Bevis Marks Synagogue as Jacob Levy.
7
His two sisters and four of his brothers were baptised at the same time; two remaining
brothers were baptised in October that year. See note on ‘radical assimilation’ and its possible
impact on the Levy parents p 7.
8
I will refer to him by the name he was using at the time.
9
The principal information available on Sarah is on her death certificate where the informant
is her fourth son George Massett Laurence. Compounding this dearth of information, notes
on the family compiled by descendants of Joseph Laurence, give Sarah’s middle names as
Maria Elizabeth.
10
Referred to variously as Simcha or Simha Hannah (or Anna), Simha de Haim, Semah,
Selia, Selina and Sarah. I will refer to her as Simha (a Hebrew word meaning gladness or
joy).
11
Zaccaria Levy’s known siblings were Mandolin, Angelo and Rachel Coen Porto. Angelo,
six years older than Zaccaria, is believed to have been in the diamond business with Zaccaria.

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Hannah 11 March 1798 (died April 1799), Alexander 6 January, 1800, George 7 July 1801,
and Louise 11 March 1803.
Both families would have some knowledge, and perhaps family stories told through
the ages, of the immemorial migrations of their people out of Palestine, dispersal through the
Roman epoch, and later through medieval, Christian Europe before their very recent settlement
in England.
We have information on why James adopted the name Laurence, but none on Lister as
first a surname, when James was in South America, and then middle name once Laurence had
been acquired.12 James was not the first member of his family to choose to name himself
Laurence. His brother Joseph began doing so in 1826, when he was 35, ‘presumably in an
attempt to assimilate himself into English society’ according to the Sunday Mail of 20
September 1992, in an article headed ‘Right Royal Jews?’ on the proposed marriage of RN
commander Timothy Laurence and Princess Anne, the daughter of Queen Elizabeth. Joseph is
Tim’s great-great grandfather.13 So, clearly James adopted the name Laurence following the
lead of his six-year older brother Joseph, although not immediately. Joseph’s marriage to
Penelope Jackson in October 1813 was evidently a coup for the Levy family in terms of
securing themselves at the upper levels in English society; among the immediate benefits was
the granting of a coat of arms to Zaccaria Levy in December the same year (see page 7, and
Endnotes).
A further newspaper article of 13 December 1992 notes that ‘Tiger Tim’ was ‘smitten
from the first time he met’ Anne, and explains that it was Tim’s ‘four-times great grandmother,
Penelope Laurence Jackson, chatelaine of a stately home bought from the Queen Mother’s
Strathmore family in County Durham, who requested that beneficiaries of her will should
change their name from Levy to Laurence. The matriarchal Penelope knew that the only way
the descendants of her five sons and four daughters would make their mark in the established,
money-making professions in those anti-Semitic times would be to shake off their Jewish roots
and conform to the expectations of the Anglican ruling classes’14
12
The only other use of the name Lister is for James’s younger brother Alexander who was
named Alexander Lister Laurence when apprehended by the police for a minor criminal
offence during the time he was incarcerated in an asylum - to which he had been admitted as
Alexander Lester Lawrance in October 1856 (when James and Sarah were already in
Australia). It is possible that Alexander took up the name out of fondness or respect for his
older, adventurous brother; or, possibly James, as Jayme, acquired it out of fondness for
Alexander, if, indeed, it was the latter’s middle name at the time. In either event the source of
‘Lister’ remains unknown, which is regrettable as it was clearly chosen deliberately, and it
lives on as the middle name of some descendants, the author amongst them. See Endnotes.
13
It was a column in the Jewish Chronicle of September 1992 which alerted the British
public and press to the possibility of a ‘real Jewish princess’. Had a ‘forebear of Cdr Tim
Laurence, the Princess Royal’s fiancé-to-be, not changed his name, she would be termed, on
marriage, HRH the Princess Royal, Mrs Timothy Levy. At least it’s not Cohen’, the column
concludes, cryptically.
14
This implies that the descendants of all her children were Jewish which is improbable since
there was a long line of Church of England clergymen amongst Penelope’s antecedents. The
‘matriarchal Penelope’s’ parents were John and Elizabeth Goodchild, and Elizabeth was the
daughter of Reverend John Laurence, rector of Bishop Wearmouth, county Durham. The

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The delirious tone of the Sunday Mail continues:

‘Even as she penned her 4000 word testament … in the parish of Houghton-le-Spring,
she knew she was orchestrating a dramatic advance for her family into the upper middle classes.
But even she could never have guessed that one of her descendants would be accepted into the
upper middle classes and would join the ranks of royalty.’
Penelope Laurence Jackson’s will, dated 4 July 1824, states, ‘I give to my
Granddaughter Penelope Levy and her husband (Joseph) the legacy of twenty pounds for
mourning and it is my earnest wish that they may change their names to my family name of
Laurence and may use their best endeavours to obtain that change by authority of parliament’.
Joseph complied and his name was changed by deed poll on 26 December 1826. All Joseph’s
brothers eventually followed his lead, but it appears that it was not always easy to conceal their
origins. As Penelope’s mother tartly told her daughter (as reported by Emma Klein in Lost
Jews), ‘They may be able to change the name but they’ll never be able to change that nose!’ –
so demonstrating where her family’s waspish sentiments lay in those ‘anti-Semitic times’.15
And by the time that James’s mother Simha produced her will (as Selina), she, like her
seven sons, was using the surname Laurence.
Klein elaborates on such ‘radical assimilation’:
Radical assimilation is very evident among the descendants of Zaccaria Levy, believed to have come
from Venice to England towards the end of the eighteenth century. Levy died in 1828 and was buried
in the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish cemetery in Mile End Road. Records show he was granted a coat-
of-arms.16 His wife’s fate was very different. None of the couple’s eleven children remained Jewish and
the family name was changed from Levy to Laurence.17 When Simha Hannah died ten years after her
husband, she was not buried in the plot reserved next to him in the Mile End Cemetery but as Mrs Selina
Hannah Laurence in Stoke Newington churchyard. Deprived of his spouse in his final resting place, one
wonders how Zaccaria Levy might have reacted to the celebrity accorded his lineage over 150 years
after his death and the knowledge that he would be the ancestor of the son-in-law of the Queen of
England.
Simha was the child of two very well-established and connected Sephardi families. As well,
she was an aunt of Moses Montefiore, son of her brother Joseph and his wife Rachel Mocatta,
the latter descended from two of England’s oldest Jewish families. Sir Moses became a
latter (1668 – 1732) wrote four books on gardening, including ‘The Clergyman’s Recreation,
Showing the Pleasure and Profit from the Art of Gardening’. His father was also a Reverend
John Lawrence.
15
Emma Klein, Lost Jews: The Struggle for Identity Today.
16
Zaccaria Levy was granted ‘Armorial Bearings’ on 11 December 1813 having petitioned
the College of Arms with the claim that ‘the arms used by his ancestors seated at Venice not
being recorded and having become a Free Denizen of this Country and his family being
established in England he wished to have Armorial Ensigns registered at the College’. The
coat of arms carries these symbols: a ship, as an emblem of sea-borne trade, bees and
beehives, symbols of banking and sound management of money, and a thyrsus, or staff,
supporting pine cone and vine leaves, associated with Dionysus (Bacchus) – possibly because
of Levy’s involvement in the wine trade. See Endnotes.
17
Nine children survived; two died in infancy.

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financier, stockbroker and philanthropist, the most prominent Jew in Britain in his day, and,
taking on the role of ‘unofficial ambassador for the Jewish people, Montefiore pioneered a
diplomatic approach to the problem of Jewish persecution that helped carve a new place for
Jews in the modern world.’18 19
Was it a personal tragedy for both Zaccaria and Simha that their offspring rejected their
Jewish heritage while other members of their families retained theirs? The Montefiores
remained resistant to the tides of assimilation, and though they declined over time as pillars of
Anglo-Jewish society, they felt no compulsion to conform to the demands and expectations of
the Anglican ruling classes, as had Joseph Levy and his siblings. Sir Moses Montefiore
remained for all his long life a devout Jew and gave substantial and recognised service towards
his less fortunate co-religionists and to the cause of Israel.20
James Levy’s exploits during his 20s and 30s might be described as adventurous –
picaresque even. He was from a large, wealthy family, the sixth of nine surviving children, and
he may have needed space and wider horizons. Equally, he might have had disagreements with
his father, perhaps over becoming a Christian, though the same would have applied to all his
siblings. Or, indeed, he may have wandered far with his parents’ blessings, and perhaps with
contacts or instructions for business undertakings – after all, they were themselves immigrants
(second generation in Simha’s case) and from families and a culture which had dispersed for
centuries, and so were accustomed to the idea of their offspring departing.
Joseph Barrow Montefiore, Simha’s nephew, so James’s cousin, and a ‘West Indian’
cousin of the famous Moses, had ‘left England in the 1820s to join other relatives in Australia’
and became one of the founders of the Sydney Jewish congregation and, later, a leading figure
in the colonisation of South Australia – a project his brother Jacob helped finance, according
to Abigail Green. There were barely 100 Jews in Australia at that time. When James and Sarah
eventually arrived in Sydney in 1853 there were some 5,500, by which time Joseph and those
‘other relatives’, who included his brother-in-law George Gershon Mocatta (also an in-law of
18
Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore, Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero. (This quote is from a
separate document headed ‘Moses Montefiore – the Australian connection’).
19
‘In 1846 Moses Montefiore went to intercede against persecution of the Jews with the Tsar
Emperor Nicholas 1st. Nicholas reportedly said to Montefiore, “If all the Jews were like you,
it would be easier to be tolerant of them.” A highly patronizing comment!’ Simon Sebag
Montefiore on the subject of his BBC series ‘Blood and Gold: the Making of Spain with
Simon Sebag Montefiore’, The Daily Mail, 28 November 2015.
20
Moses Montefiore’s renown was such that he inspires thoughts both pleasing and
melancholy in Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Bloom is awaiting service in a
butcher’s shop and midst carnal contemplation aroused by meat and the ‘nextdoor girl at the
counter’ he turns an eye to the advertisements in the newspaper used for wrapping: ‘The
model farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias. Can become ideal winter sanatorium.
Moses Montefiore. I thought he was. Farmhouse, wall around it, blurred cattle cropping’, a
reference to Montefiore’s role as promoter of settlement in Palestine. Bucolic reveries stay
with Bloom as he walks home, musing idly on the Mediterranean and the Levant, olive and
citrus groves, and then, suddenly, despondency: ‘the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah,
Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land. It bore the oldest, the first race ...
Wandered far away all over the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born
everywhere.’ Bloom of course is Jewish.

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James’s mother) would have been well-established. Historian Manning Clark describes Joseph
Montefiore as ‘the Croesus of Sydney Town’.21 George Mocatta became a pastoralist with
holdings in Victoria and NSW and, later, a produce merchant in Sydney, at about the time of
the arrival of the Laurences.
The Montefiores were energetically cosmopolitan, with branches in Livorno, Gibraltar,
Barbados, Marseilles and Morocco: ‘the Anglo-Italian Montefiore family exemplified the
broad geographic reach of the Western Sephardic diaspora’, Green observes. Jews since time
immemorial had taken the opportunity to move, or they had been forced to by pogroms and
other assaults deriving from endemic anti-Semitism. As the Times Atlas of World History puts
it, ‘For over 2000 years the history of the Jews has been a story of external dispersion and
internal cohesion.’
Members of the now Christian Levy/Laurence family had emigrated and settled in
Australia before James and Sarah’s 1853 arrival. The first descendant of Zaccaria and Simha
to come to Australia is believed to have been Charles Haines Barlee, son of James’s older sister
Justina and her husband Reverend Edward Barlee Buckle, who migrated to South Australia in
1839. In 1858 Charles married his first cousin, Amy Louise Laurence, daughter of James’s
brother Benjamin Laurence, in St John’s Church Darlinghurst, with James Lister and his
daughter Matilda Eliza as witnesses. Another of Justina’s children, Frederick Palgrave Barlee,
came to Australia following his appointment as colonial secretary for Western Australia in
1855, a position he held for 20 years. The Australian Dictionary of Biography records that ‘Sir
Frederick Palgrave Barlee (1827-1884), colonial secretary, was born on 6 February 1827 at
Worlingworth, Suffolk, England, seventh of the ten children of Rev. Edward Barlee Buckle
and his wife Justina, daughter of Zachariah Levy, a Jewish merchant of Walthamstow, who
had married into the Gentile family of Laurence’ (my italics) – a revealing entry as it
demonstrates how inaccuracies, some perhaps deliberate, are perpetuated, even in official
records.22 Barlee was involved in promoting Western Australia, seeking investment in mining
as well as settlers and travelled to the eastern colonies in 1870 to study more advanced
legislative and administrative arrangements – NSW was by then self-governing. He also
undertook a second journey to Sydney to represent Western Australia at an intercolonial
conference in 1873, just a year before James’s death.
One of Justina’s daughters, Catherine, also went to Western Australia, arriving in 1876
(just after her brother’s departure) with her husband Reverend James Allen; he had been a
digger during the gold rush in Victoria and gave refuge to the Eureka stockade militant,
Irishman Peter Lalor, a somewhat unexpected action from a family that seemed to exude
establishment values. Two sons of James’s brother George, Edward and Henry Laurence, also
settled in Western Australia; the first became a magistrate and the second a minister in the
church.
The evidence of James witnessing the marriage of a nephew and niece, and of this
couple, some years later, witnessing the marriage of Matilda Eliza Laurence to George Turner
in Brisbane, and also the numbers settling in Western Australia, confirm that there was
21
Manning Clark, A History of Australia Vol IV.
22
The Australian Dictionary of Biography Vol 3, MUP, 1969.

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communication amongst family members, though most likely infrequent meetings given their
far-flung places of settlement.
To cross oceans and move continents, then, was probably not a confronting endeavour
for James. He travelled far and wide, as his ancestors had done, and took up opportunities in
four continents. He had Laurence and Montefiore relatives already in Australia. Nevertheless
his demise in Sydney in December 1874 marks the end of a tremendous journey in time, place
and culture from his origins; this is presumably the same for Sarah, but we know nothing about
her early life.
They were just two of the numberless souls who made what in today’s world with our
instant communications and ever faster transportation, seem like unimaginable relocations, and
who were given or created opportunities to establish or remake themselves if they were lucky
enough or tenacious enough to survive the challenges and rigours of sea and land journeys,
warfare, and countless privations of every description.
3. SEPHARDIM IN LONDON AND THE WORLD
ZACCARIA AND SIMHA WERE MARRIED at the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue at Bevis
Marks London on 10 October 1787. She was named in the register Simha de Moses Haim
Montefiore. Bevis Marks is the oldest synagogue in the United Kingdom, established in 1701,
and the only synagogue in Europe which has held regular services continuously for over 300
years.23 There were only about 500 Sephardim in London at the end of the 17th century;
amongst them were Jews whose origins were in Spain, expelled in 1492, and resettled into
Jewish communities in Venice and Amsterdam, Sephardim from the West Indies, and new
Christians (conversos) from France and the Iberian Peninsula and its colonies.24 By this time
they had been joined by Jews of German origin from Holland, Poland and the Holy Roman
Empire, known as Ashkenazim. In the 1750s when Simha’s father, Moses Vita Montefiore,
settled in London, there were some 2000 Sephardim in England, and 6000 Ashkenazim.
Throughout the 18th century, the really wealthy and powerful Jews in London came
mainly from the Spanish and Portuguese community and attended its synagogue in Bevis
Marks. These wealthier Sephardim were financiers and merchants, trading through networks
of relatives scattered across Europe and the New World.
By the time that Simha’s parents settled in England, Jews were generally well-treated.
During the Jacobite rising of 1745, the Jewish community had shown considerable loyalty to
the government. Their chief financier, Samson Gideon, helped underwrite the British national
debt and supported the stock market, while several of the younger members of the community
had volunteered in the corps raised to defend London. Possibly in gratitude, the prime minister,
Henry Pelham, introduced the Jew Bill of 1753 which allowed Jews to become naturalised by
application to parliament. It passed the Lords without much opposition, but on being brought
to the House of Commons, the Tories, typically, created a great disturbance against this
23
Near Aldgate station in the City of London today.
24
For a brief history of Judaism in Spain, see Simon Sebag Montefiore, Endnotes.

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‘abandonment of Christianity’. The Whigs, however, with a policy of religious toleration,

persisted, and the bill was passed. So well-to-do Jews, at least, were accepted into society.
Green observes that:
The Sephardim regarded themselves as the elite of London’s Jewish community. As late as 1772 the
Mahamad, as their governing body was called, refused permission for a Sephardi-Ashkenazi marriage
in Bevis Marks … There was more to this designation than pride in their status as firstcomers; in fact it
reflected proud cultural contempt. The Sephardim in London came largely from families that had lived
as Christians for decades if not centuries – at once rejected by and assimilated into the gentile societies
of the Iberian Peninsula. When they arrived in ports like Amsterdam and London to reintegrate into
Jewish society, they found they had relatively little in common with the historically segregated
Ashkenazi Jews of northern Europe. Put crudely: for many Sephardim, Judaism was a religion; for the
Ashkenazim it remained an all embracing way of life.
The contrast between the two communities made a vivid impression on a Prussian visitor to
England at about the time of James Levy’s birth, as reported by Green. The Prussian was
‘astonished at the prodigious difference between the Portuguese and German Jews … Dress,
language, manners, cleanliness, are all in favour of the former, who indeed can scarcely be
distinguished from Christians’. In virulent language he described the German Jews as ‘the very
refuse of human nature … obliged to take refuge in England, where they live by roguery; if
they themselves do not steal, they at least help to conceal and dispose of the plunder.’
Rich Sephardim, like the Mocattas and Montefiores, rapidly adopted the way of life of
the English upper-bourgeoisie. This included playing cards, going to coffee houses, the theatre
and opera, buying country estates, visiting fashionable resorts like Brighton,25 even wearing
‘décolleté dresses’. In general there was a level of assimilation ‘particularly amongst wealthy
Sephardim financiers, for whom conversion had always been the final barrier to total social
acceptance. Assimilation caused the number of Jewish marriages held in the Spanish and
Portuguese synagogue to plummet by 43 percent between 1740 and 1800, despite the continued
influx of newcomers like the Montefiores.’26
We assume that Zaccaria Levy was a Sephardic Jew, particularly since he and Simha
were married at the Bevis Marks synagogue, and the Montefiores were so prominent a Sephardi
clan. However it should be noted that there were some very wealthy Ashkenazi families, and
since marriage in Sephardic circles in England and Western Europe was usually a matter of
money and connections, sometimes this resulted in mixed marriages. Moses Montefiore
himself married Judith Barent-Cohen in 1812: ‘The Barent-Cohens belonged to London’s
Ashkenazi elite and were well networked with leading families like the Goldsmids many of
whom shared their Dutch background. Sephardi-Ashkenazi marriages were still rare, but they
no longer carried quite the frisson attached to them thirty years earlier’, or when Zaccaria and
Simha were married. Moses saw the benefits of extending his relationships socially and
financially through his mixed marriage and even joined the Freemason lodge which was a
25
Zaccaria and Simha owned Montpelier Villas, a house in Regency Square, Brighton,
26
Green.

Murray Laurence
stronghold of Ashkenazim and into which his brother-in-law, Nathan Rothschild, had been
initiated some years earlier.27
Sephardim who settled in Italy usually took the name of the town from which they came
and it is supposed that the Montefiores must have lived in the northern Italian hill town of
Montefiore Conca. However the family kept moving over generations settling for lengths of
time in Rimini, Ravenna, Ancona and Livorno. Simha’s father, Moses Vita, was born in
Livorno in 1712. Livorno had developed into an extraordinarily vibrant, cosmopolitan,
mercantile city, drawing entrepreneurs and traders from east and west who created for Livorno
a dominant role in trade between the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Levant. The port was
a tax haven, and the people enjoyed widespread freedoms. As contemporary historian Edward
Gibbon observed in 1764, ‘Every nation can arrive here and live according to their religion and
under the protection of their own laws … This is the veritable land of Canaan for the Jews,
who experience here a mildness unknown in the rest of Italy. The interests of commerce have
almost silenced the conversionist spirit of the Church of Rome.’
There was vigorous competition amongst Mediterranean ports, especially in trade with
Britain, and just as Livorno had attracted the formerly hidden Jews of Spain and Portugal, so
the readmission of Jews to England in 1656 encouraged such conversos to settle in London.
‘Here they were undisturbed by the discriminatory legal and social structures established in
most European countries to constrain and control the Jewish community’, according to Abigail
Green.
They may have been free and tolerated in certain circles, but prejudice remained, and
for this reason Sephardim retained strong family ties across the Mediterranean and Atlantic;
perhaps they never knew when they might have to move again. So family connections were
the driver of international business with the Western Sephardi diaspora being pioneers of
international trade and finance. In the absence of any developed international banking system,
Sephardi businessmen knew they could rely on relatives and friends overseas. Consequently
Jewish businessmen played a central role in commerce between London and Livorno,
dominating the trade in coral and diamonds which ran between Livorno, London and India.28
So when Moses Vita began moving between Italy and England he found a thriving
network; active in the coral and diamond trade and the importation of other Italian goods
including, improbably, Livorno straw hats, he settled in London permanently in 1754, in
Philpot Lane, Fenchurch Street. By 1760 he was prosperous, opportunistic and well-regarded,
and invited to join the 800 merchants who gave addresses on the occasion of the accession of
George III, and to kiss the king’s hand, which sounds like an occasion to be endured, but
undoubtedly was one which enhanced reputations.
27
Green
28
Interestingly, James’s next oldest brother Benjamin, married a Carolina Darby whose
father was a merchant in Livorno (Leghorn in English); as her grandfather was a British
admiral, it is unlikely that they were a Jewish family; younger brother George married
Caroline Helen Euphemia Hayes, daughter of a merchant in Smyrna, a predominantly Greek
city in the Ottoman empire (now in Turkey) and a prominent trading port. Such connections
attest to the vigorous enmeshment of the Levy and Montefiore families in trade across the
Mediterranean and the Levant.

Murray Laurence
James’s father, Zaccaria Levy, was also prosperous. He was a merchant and ship owner
and was one of the first Jewish underwriters to become a member at Lloyds. As we have seen,
the family had its own coat of arms, with the vainglorious sounding motto ‘If God is with us
who can be against us?’29 Why did James not work in the family business in London?30 Why
did he roam about from England to South America, to the Caribbean, to North America, to
Central America then finally to New South Wales? The presence of the diasporic Montefiores
and Levys would most likely have been important.
In a comment on the young Moses Montefiore, Green notes, ‘Even at this tender age,
Moses understood that he belonged to an international network and took it for granted that
travel – at least as far as Italy – would play a part in his adult life. This cosmopolitan orientation
was his birthright as a Montefiore and a child of the Sephardi diaspora.’
Montefiore’s immediate family background in London and Livorno added an important element to this
heritage. Both were port cities in which Jews could lead lives relatively free of discrimination and
oppressive legislation. Theirs was a situation of almost unique privilege. Jews in the United States and
in British colonies, like the West Indies, were treated as equal citizens, but in the old world there were
very few places – perhaps only Amsterdam – where Jews were as comfortably off as they were in
London and Livorno. Moses Montefiore inevitably had quite different expectations of life and a wholly
different understanding of the place of Jews in society from those he would have acquired growing up
in the ghettos and shtetls of Germany and eastern Europe, or living as a Jew in the lands of Islam under
the Pact of Umar.31 32
We know much more about the Montefiores than the Levys because of the relative fame of
Moses, but perhaps we can infer aspects of the lifestyle of privileged Jews from reading about
Moses’s childhood. Moses was educated in a small private school where he learnt the basics
including French. His father’s brother, Joshua Montefiore, and his mother’s brother, Moses
Mocatta, were influential in his early life. The latter was a Jewish scholar of distinction and ‘it
is highly likely that the Montefiore children received their religious education at his hands.’33
Given the cosmopolitan sophistication of the family, this may have included the girls, Simha
among them. It is very likely that the children of Zaccaria and Simha were multilingual,
speaking Italian, French and possibly Spanish or Portuguese.
Moses always regarded his dashing ‘Uncle Josh’ (born in 1762), Simha’s older brother
by five years, as a favourite. As described by Abigail Green, he was adventurous, dressed
29
‘Deus Nobiscum Quis Contra’. Reverend Christopher Laurence, a descendant of Joseph
Levy/Laurence, remarks, ‘is it not odd that for the motto on his coat of arms he chose a
Christian quotation, (from St Paul)?’
30
Two of James’s brothers, Zaccaria and George, worked in their father’s business at Bury
Court, while Joseph entered the world of finance, joining Lloyds, then became one of the
founding members of the London Stock Exchange, establishing the company Levy Brothers
(with George) in 1814; it became Laurence Bros at the appropriate time and later, Laurence
Sons and Gardner.
31
Green.
32
The Pact of Umar, a document purportedly signed by the second caliph, Umar I (634-44),
is the source of the restrictive regulations on non-Muslims in Syria, Mesopotamia and
Jerusalem, embedded in the sharia or Islamic law.
33
Green.

Murray Laurence
flamboyantly in laced red coat, cocked hat and sword, and was one of the few survivors of a
bizarre and calamitous expedition to settle an island off the coast of West Africa, during which
some of the settlers were hacked to death by enraged tribesmen and most of the rest died of
fever. Joshua Montefiore wrote a book about it titled, An Authentic Account of the Late
Expedition to Bulam on the Coast of Africa with a Description of the Present Settlement of
Sierra Leone and the Adjacent Country. When your own brother becomes involved in an
outlandish scheme such as this, perhaps you are somewhat prepared when your 23 year old son
crosses the Atlantic to take part in anti-colonial wars in the Americas.
The Times once declared of Moses, that ‘he has been the victorious defender of
persecuted Jews because he was the perfect English gentleman’, a risible statement in what it
implies about the singular gifts of the ‘English gentleman’, and about which Green says
‘nothing could be further from the truth’. Yes, on his mother’s side were deep Anglo-Jewish
roots, but he was also the son of second generation Italian immigrants. Moses himself was born
in Italy because his father, Simha’s brother, travelled there extensively on business, retaining
very close links with their Italian relatives.
Green doesn’t cover all of Moses Vita’s siblings but does say that ‘Moses’s uncles and
aunts were scattered across the Western Hemisphere’. Simha’s brother Judah (marrying Reina
Montefiore of Livorno) and sister Jayley (Jael, also marrying a Montefiore, Prospero Massaod)
remained in Livorno, sister Sarah married Abraham Israel of Gibraltar. Two other brothers,
Eliezer and Jacob, settled in Barbados; two sisters Reyna and Rachel married Jews from
Jamaica and Barbados respectively. And another sister, Lydia, who remained unmarried,
settled in Marseilles, ‘presumably because she had relatives there.’ Joseph, Moses’s father,
Simha’s brother, almost certainly corresponded and had dealings with his siblings and family
overseas.
While being noticeably anglicised, the Spanish and Portuguese congregation in London
remained foreign in many ways; they continued to conduct their key business in Portuguese,
though of course many spoke Italian, Judeo-Spanish and Arabic. And those attending the Bevis
Marks Synagogue would have been familiar with the Turkish dress of the Moroccan pedlars
who frequented the area and the turbans and robes of the North African scholars.
The British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore is descended from a Moroccan nephew
of Moses, Joseph Sebag-Montefiore, son of his sister Sarah. He has written about his ancestry
as follows:
My distant family were called Carvajal. Two of them, Leonore and Luis, were burned at the stake by
the Spanish Inquisition in 1596 (in Mexico) simply for having ‘impure’ Jewish blood and secretly
practising Judaism. But Leonore’s young son Joseph somehow escaped to freedom. He sailed to Italy
where he settled in a Tuscan village called Montefiore – and took its name. A new family, the
Montefiores, arose like a phoenix out of the ashes. Joseph and his son, Judah Leone Montefiore, are my
grandfathers many times removed; Leonore was my 12-times grandmother.
I thought I knew the history of my family well. The Montefiores were Italian Jews who in the 1790s
emigrated from Tuscany to London where they flourished. One son, Moses Montefiore, joined the Stock
Exchange in the early 19th century and started to make a fortune. Moses bought an estate in Ramsgate,
Kent, and let the young Princess Victoria, on holiday at the seaside with her mother, the Duchess of
Kent, play in his gardens. When she became Queen, Victoria wrote in her diary that Moses impressed

Murray Laurence
her as a noble and decent ‘Hebrew’ and soon after her accession she knighted him and later he received
a baronetcy.34
James Levy gives the impression of moving about haphazardly as opportunities or ideas
presented themselves. Of course the places he travelled to have been populated by immigrants
and it was not at all unusual for a man from England to emigrate to the Americas or Australia,
but we have the idea of our ancestors who came here, aside from those who came in chains,
having a plan and purposefully emigrating then settling. Given this logic, and the status and
wealth of his parents, it is difficult to conclude other than that James played some role in a
larger family scheme – though fortune, coincidence, hazard and the cold indifference of the
world can play havoc with any scheme.
4. A ONE THOUSAND AND ONE ARABIAN NIGHTS TALE AND A DNA DETOUR
INTO THE CABAL OF THE LEVITES
EMMA KLEIN quotes research undertaken by the genealogist Robert Barrett (who revealed the
Levy connection to Tim Laurence, and gave this information to Klein in personal
correspondence in 1994): ‘It is written that he (Zaccaria Levy) was from Venice and that his
family was settled there for many years before. When I went to research the Jewry in Venice,
there was no reference to Zaccaria, not even in another part of Italy. From a blanket search of
all Jewish communities throughout the world I was able to discover that he came from
Baghdad. There were two Levy brothers and they stole monies in Baghdad and went on to
make an enormous amount of money there.’
This information came to Barrett from a descendant of Zaccaria’s brother in New York;
it is apparently supported with documentary evidence. The brother supposedly came with
Zaccaria to England for a time, and then settled in France. His descendants, unlike those of
Zaccaria, retained the surname Levy, and mostly remain Jewish despite dispersing all over the
world. However, a researcher in the US, Adam Rahbee, has concluded that the Baghdad story
is highly unreliable. It originated with a relative of his, David Shamash, the New Yorker who
gave it to Barrett. Shamash took the oral history in his family about a Levi/Levy ancestor and
a lost or stolen estate and conflated it with a Zaccaria Levy who imported jewels into England
through the Levant Company from the Ottoman Empire and the Levant, and who imported a
shipment of jewels in 1816 – at the time the family believes their ancestor’s fortune was taken
to England. In 2009 Shamash published a novel titled Fortune, a thriller dramatizing his own
and others’ research, and presenting it as fact; it inspired several newspaper features including
one in the Israeli paper Haaretz in 2009 headed, ‘Iraqi Israelis Scramble for Family Hidden
Treasure in UK’. It is true that there was a group in Israel in the 1990s attempting to track down
the treasure, but much else in the Shamash book is fiction.35
34
Simon Sebag Montefiore, ‘How I found out my ancestors were burned at the stake by the
Spanish Inquisition’, Blood and Gold.
35
Interestingly, Zaccaria Levy’s estate was sued long after his death over his brother
Angelo’s will (of which he was an executor) as one of the other executors, Peter Augustus
Macirone, was found not to have been a British citizen; the case involved a substantial house

Murray Laurence
Nevertheless this tale of chimerical loot had been running for a long time. In 1957 the
New York Times reported on two Iraqi brothers, Elazar and Shimon Levi, who smuggled jewels
into London in 1816 and left a fortune, estimated to be some $392m. The report noted that ‘two
hundred Israeli Jews are now locked in a bitter legal struggle with the Bank of England …
Most of the Jews involved are destitute immigrants from Iraq living in slums and barracks.’
The governments of Iran and Iraq were also trying to join the legal struggle.36 Adam Rahbee
has a letter from 1956 revealing that his grandmother was a participant in this action, and this
is what motivated him to embark on research to unravel the mystery.
More recently a Canadian Jewish newsletter, delighting in this as a ‘One Thousand and
One Arabian Nights story’, reported that Iraqi Jews from Tel Aviv to Toronto seek to prove
they are the rightful heirs to a fabulous fortune amassed by two Levy brothers from Baghdad
in the 19th century, ‘in a case that has been coursing through the British courts for years.’ The
newsletter embellishes the puzzle with the dazzle of royalty: ‘In the 18th century a merchant
from Venice, Zaccaria Levy, who may or may not have been an Iraqi Levy, settled in Britain.
In 1826 his son, Joseph, changed the family name to Laurence … On Dec 12 1992 Timothy
Laurence, a direct descendant of the Levy clan, wed Princess Anne, Queen Elizabeth’s
daughter’. Could a ‘full-fledged member of Britain’s royal family’ be among the ‘rightful
heirs’? Confusion abounds: two Levy brothers Elazar and Shimon changed their name to the
teasingly close ‘Lawrence’ after migrating to England.37
It is indeed a thousand and one nights tale, and a persistent and tantalizing one.
Adam Rahbee, sceptical of the Shamash hypothesis, undertook the task of trying to
establish whether or not his Levi ancestor (and that of David Shamash) is indeed our Zaccaria
Levy. At his request I took a genetic test through Family Tree DNA. Adam explains: ‘I selected
you for the DNA test to provide us with a y-DNA sample for a male lineage descendant of
Zaccaria Levy. We compared this to two male lineage descendants of the Levi/Levys in my
family (but not myself, because I'm not in the Levi male lineage) – two third/fourth cousins,
one in Los Angeles and one in London.’
The results showed Shamash’s story to be baseless, and that Adam’s family is not
related to the Zaccaria Levy born in 1751 (our ancestor) and so is not the Levy his relatives are
seeking. In essence Shamash confused their ancestor, whom Adam has established was named
Mordecai not Zaccaria, with our Zaccaria, and it was Mordecai who was from Baghdad and
whose descendants carry the story of an abandoned, stolen or lost fortune. There is archival
evidence that this tale may be true.38
The DNA test revealed that my paternal line, and that of all male descendants of
Zaccaria Levy, is the ‘European modal haplotype R specifically RM 198’ and connected
genetically with people who have traced their ancestry back to 16th century Europe – Hungary,
in Devonshire Square which had ‘escheated to the Crown’, so that the defendant, a
descendant of Angelo, had never received her share. Money was taken from Zaccaria’s
remaining Bank of England account to compensate her. Shamash had mistakenly taken this
story as part of the ‘stolen’, ‘missing’, or ‘abandoned’ jewels and money saga.
36
The New York Times, 5 May 1957.
37
The Canadian Jewish News, 5 August 1999.
38
Adam Rahbee, email correspondence 2016-18.

Murray Laurence
Germany, Lithuania, Silesia and so on.39 A lot of these are close matches with a common male
ancestor within 300 years. One result of this test was contact from a researcher in Israel whose
ambition is the genealogy of Levites, ‘to preserve the Levite heritage within the Jewish
peoples’, more specifically of ‘the compact 500,000 men Levite cluster within the small nation
of 15 million Jews worldwide’.40
Further information on Zaccaria Levy’s origins comes from correspondence with
descendants of Joseph Levy in England. Christopher Laurence writes, ‘I have spent time in the
Venice Archivo and also employed an Italian family researcher. Even so, I do not know the
names of Zaccaria’s parents, only that there is no record of his birth in Venice. My researcher
pointed out that the Venice Ghetto had a crowd of Levis cheek by jowl, so it was hard to
distinguish relationships in particular families. Angelo appears in London in 1785, and also his
brother Mandolin. They also came from Venice - I saw the record of Mandolin's last payment
of cargo-duty in 1777 … our ancestor thought he had been born in Venice, but wasn’t, though
he grew up there working in the family shipping business (his name spelled Zachariah in Italy).
When he migrated to London with his mother in 1777 he occupied premises that were already
occupied by a Zaccaria Levy, so the family business was here before he arrived and which he
expanded very successfully. He was able to give his daughter Justina an astronomical dowry
when she married in 1818.’
So confusion persists on the question of Zaccaria’s place of birth, and while the above
suggests that he and the family certainly worked in Venice, commentary on Paul Sebag’s Les
noms des Livournais hints that Livorno may have been his birthplace, so giving us the
enchanting possibility that the Levys may well have known the Montefiores and Racahs. 41
This doesn’t assist with the task of determining whether Zaccaria Levy was Sephardic
(though it should be noted that Meir Gover’s work is mainly directed to preserving the Levite
Ashkenazi heritage). It is the social standing of the Montefiores and the requirements of the
Spanish Portuguese synagogue, as well as the fact that Zaccaria Levy is buried in London’s
Spanish and Portuguese cemetery which suggest this conclusion, along with the fact that Jews
from Livorno were primarily of Iberian origin. It is also true that the distinction between the
two lines is not as clear as often supposed, and we wonder whether it is really very important
in the world today. Spanish Jews dispersed widely including to the Ottoman Arab world and
central Europe where they may have intermarried with Ashkenazim, particularly if they were
not from wealthy or influential families. Finally, while inquiring into and preserving the
39
‘Haplogroup R originated in Central Asia. Most descendants belong to one of two major
lineages. They are present at low frequencies across Central Asia, South Asia, and Europe’,
according to the Family Tree DNA website.
40
Document from Meir Gover explaining his research, and bearing the motto ‘he who forgets
his past has no future’, July 2016: ‘Y chromosome alleles are inherited almost identically,
with minute mutations only from father to his genetic sons. Y marker research evolved into
an exact science @ 100% certainty. Similarly, Jewish religious rules determine that the
religious status of Levi is delegated solely from a Levite father to his genetic sons. These two
axioms are the cornerstone of this research.’ Further, ‘Even if during the span of ages one’s
Levite heritage … might have been forgotten or lost … his Y chromosome remembers
forever and he remains of Levite descent!’
41
Lionel Levy, comment on appendix to Paul Sebag, Les noms des Juifs de Tunisie.

Murray Laurence
heritage of any ethnic, cultural or religious group is commendable, the mission of trying to
create an exclusive brotherhood of Levite men seems not to be a useful activity in contemporary
times. DNA does not create identity: its variation amongst humans is a miniscule 0.1%, and all
of humankind shares the same fundamental psychological and cognitive makeup, so militating
against a romantic cult of ancestry and provenance.42
5. ZACCARIA LEVY’S DEATH AND WILL
ZACCARIA LEVY’S WILL dated 5 February 1821 (seven years before his death on 9 April 1828)
leaves his wife ‘Simha Anna Levy’ the sum of five hundred pounds to be paid to her upon his
death, ‘And I also give to my said wife all my Wines and Spirits that may be in and around my
dwelling house … and I also give to my said wife all Jewels and Ornaments of her person
usually worn by her for her own use and benefit’. These bequests give some small indication
of the couple’s private lives. Levy also bequeathed 100 pounds to each of his sister Hannah
Rocha of Trieste, Penelope Levy, wife of his son Joseph, Caroline Levy, wife of son Benjamin,
and his daughter Justina Barlee.
Twenty pounds was left to each of the clerks ‘employed in my partnership counting
house’ (the financial side of the business); all furniture and fixtures of the counting house and
warehouse to sons Joseph and Zaccaria. The latter (‘or such of them that shall be in partnership
with me’) also receive a tenth of the estate. No other children are mentioned by name but each
is to receive a tenth of the estate, as is Simha.
A codicil to the will, dated 15 April 1825, when Zaccaria Levy was still in ‘good health
and of sound mind’, adds further provision for his ‘beloved wife, I give and bequeath for her
sole use and benefit the product of the policy of Insurance effected on my Life at the Bank and
Insurance Office originally for five hundred pounds but accumulated since to about seven
hundred and fifty pounds increasing at about fifteen pounds a year during my life …’ This
codicil also noted ‘the following alteration, viz that the Share of my Estate as bequeathed to
my son Alexander instead of being paid to him after my Decease should be invested on
Government Security by my Executors in their Names to be kept in Trust by them or a survivor
or survivors of them on behalf of said my Son to pay him the dividends only to retain the capital
with power to withhold both principal and interest for his benefit at their discretion in case he
should attempt to dispose of the same or any part thereof, the said Executors to be empowered
to consent to any Marriage Settlement which they may approve of my said Son to have power
42
As well as an abundance of reading material on the history of the Levites (see Meir Halevi
Gover, Book of Levi, Second Generation Publication, 2018) the most recent communication
from Meir Gover on our genetic heritage is as follows:
‘Your Y111 does confirm my prediction and goes a notch downstream. Your sub-cluster
under FGC 18222 is predicted as R1a-YP1367. This puts your Levite patronym ancestor in
the Rhineland 18th century. In your private case it seems that your ancestor crossed the Alps
from Italy into central Europe.’ This is a matter for further investigation – or to be put aside
and forgotten.

Murray Laurence
to will.’ This exceptional provision suggests that Alexander was incapacitated in some way
(see Endnotes).
We can conclude then that James Levy received a substantial sum upon his father’s
death, although he is not mentioned by name in the will. James travelled to England from New
York in August 1828 aboard the ill-fated Electra (see page 32) after his father’s death in April,
but possibly at the time of the execution of the will.
He is shown to be comfortably well-off during his subsequent travels, for, on the
register of the arrival in New York of the ship Olive Branch from Havana in May 1837, he is
listed as a ‘gentleman’, with ‘lady and child’ – his wife Sarah and James Frederick, their first
son – although ‘gentleman’ equally suggests a pleasing self-assessment.43 Prior to this on 3
October 1836 he appears on the US and Canada Travel and Immigration passenger lists as ‘J.
Laurence, merchant’, arriving in New Orleans on the vessel Chase. In the US census of ‘free
inhabitants ‘of 25 October 1850, in the parish of Orleans, Louisiana, he is a ‘merchant’.
6. ADVENTURING IN SOUTH AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN WITH JAYME

LISTER: OVERVIEW
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE is reported to have said that to understand a person you must know
what was happening in the world when he was 20. We have noted some of the radical
transformations taking place in the wide world in the early 19th century, and in 1819 when he
was just over 20, James Levy ventured out in the most unexpected way – he embarked for
South America as a volunteer with the Irish Legion to join Simon Bolivar’s epic campaign for
the liberation of Venezuela and neighbouring countries from Spain.44 We are fortunate in
having a journal written by James between 1819 and 1829; it is far from detailed but is
compelling reading, containing first-hand information about his wide-ranging movements, the
43
The entry with ‘lady and child’ hints that the couple may not have been married at that
time (see p 40).
44
Simon Bolivar had met Alexander von Humboldt and his co-expeditioner Aimé Bonpland
in 1804 in Paris and there they gave the 21 year old Venezuelan the germ of an idea: a
revolution makes its own leaders and a single man could change the course of history; there
was no better example than Napoleon. ‘And South America was a land ripe with possibility;
Bolivar had been told so by the greatest scientist of his time.’ Within a decade Bolivar had
become an outstanding military commander, strategist and inspiring leader. His orations to
troops – whose origins were from throughout the Americas and overseas – and represented a
‘gallimaufry’ of races, classes and backgrounds – were legendary: ‘Soldiers! You are about
to complete the greatest task heaven can command to man – saving a world from slavery.
Soldiers! The enemies you are about to destroy pride themselves in fourteen uninterrupted
years of victory. They are worthy of measuring their weapons against yours, which have
gleamed in a thousand battles. Soldiers! Peru and America look to you for peace … Even
liberal Europe contemplates you in awe, for freedom in the New World is the hope of the
universe. Will you let it slip away? No, no! You are invincible!’ Marie Arana, Bolivar: The
Epic Life of the Man who Liberated South America. We have no idea whether our ancestor
was impressed with such oration.

Murray Laurence
various military engagements in which he was involved, and his seemingly frequent
misadventures.
Levy was known as Jayme Lister when in South America. The journal does not identify
him, but documents in Spanish, dated September 1825, and signed by Simon Bolivar,
Libertador Presidente, under the seal of the Republic of Colombia, refer to him by that name.
They also confirm his rank upon retirement as teniente coronel graduado – brevet lieutenant
colonel.45
Jayme’s diary gives no reason for his venturing to South America as a soldier of
fortune.46 It tells us only briefly about his reaction, a young, well-to-do Londoner, to being
involved in violent, bloody, military action, seeing mayhem, death and traumatic injury on the
battlefield and to being exposed to utterly alien people and circumstances. We have no idea
what training he received.
The British and Irish legions, totalling some 5,500, are said to have been motivated by
a combination of financial rewards and a commitment to the cause of freedom from Spanish
tyranny in Latin America. This latter motivation seems one-eyed, at least for the English
recruits, given the populations elsewhere in the world who then lived under British occupation
and oppression. It has been assumed that many of the volunteers were demobilised and
impoverished soldiers from the Napoleonic wars; about 25 years of warfare against both
revolutionary and Napoleonic France had left hundreds of thousands of former British soldiers
living precariously. As well, South America was imagined to be a place where fortunes could
be made, the old maddening Spanish lure of El Dorado in a new incarnation. Britain and Spain
were nominally allies – and had been so during the Peninsular War against Bonaparte, so it is
interesting that the involvement of such mercenaries was tolerated at all by the British
government. It is not known exactly how many there were because under the 1819 Foreign
Enlistment Act the recruitment of such forces was illegal in Britain, and so accurate records
are rare. The fate of most of these individuals was early death, disease or desertion, and
therefore there were few documentary records from survivors. Some of those who did survive
settled in Colombia and Venezuela; a few attained positions of prestige and influence.
Matthew Brown has written an account of the foreign soldiers in the Bolivarian
campaigns and has built a database of some 3,000 who joined the fight. 47 Commenting on the
popular notion that the volunteers were veterans of the Napoleonic wars ‘seeking guns and
glory’, Dr Brown, in an interview, said, ‘No, that is not the case. I cross-referenced the military
records in Caracas, Bogotá and Quito with the British Army War Office archive in London and
found that certainly no more than one in three had military experience. The rest were laborers,
peasants and artisans. They wanted glory and adventure too, but also pay, security and,
45
As mentioned previously, we have no information on where the name Lister came from. It
is quite possible that, given his family’s standing in Britain, Levy wished to conceal his
identity. In any case, he was the first of his brothers to adopt a new surname. I will refer to
him as Jayme Lister in this section.
46
The members of the Irish and other foreign legions are referred to variously as ‘volunteers’
and ‘soldiers of fortune’. They were generally well paid.
47
Matthew Brown, Adventuring through Spanish Colonies: Simon Bolivar, Foreign
Mercenaries and the Birth of New Nations. Levy does not appear in this database as Levy,
Lister or Laurence.

Murray Laurence
sometimes, a new life. Many of them pretended to have military experience so the Venezuelans
would take them seriously.’48 These comments on the background of most of the volunteers
clearly refer to the non-officer class, rather than to middle and upper class volunteers such as
Lister.49 Brown adds that ‘the overall contribution of British and Irish mercenaries to the
success of the independence armies was probably pretty negligible. In the greater scheme of
things they were small in number, expensive, complained a lot, and died rather quickly. Many
of them struggled to learn Spanish and left for home as soon as they could.’50
But there was at least one very significant contribution: ‘The remaining foreign
mercenaries were important as their presence shaped the way Bolívar and others thought about
Gran Colombia, which was designed as a nation where anybody could be a citizen and a patriot,
no matter where they were born or what their ethnicity, just as long as they believed fervently
in the cause of freedom. This was down, in no small part, to the presence of foreign mercenaries
in the army’.
Gran Colombia, between 1819 and 1830, consisted of the former colonial territories of
Ecuador, Panama, Venezuela and New Granada (now Colombia). The Irish were mainly,
though not exclusively, involved in the New Granadan section of Gran Colombia.
Bolivar is reported to have said that the foreign mercenaries were ‘saviours’, but that
was after one particularly furious and gruesome battle, the Battle of Carabobo, on 24 June
1821, where 600 English, Irish, Scots and Welsh soldiers helped secure a victory after General
Jose Antonio Paez’s cavalry charge was repelled by artillery. Of this day, Marie Arana writes,
‘Then as the Irish and English marched off – a bedraggled third of the number that had marched
in – Bolivar was overcome with emotion. “Saviours of my country!” he cried after them in
gratitude.’ We have no record of Lister’s involvement in this battle, with the only note in his
diary for 1821 being his return from Jamaica to Santa Marta in January.
While Lister was actively involved in warfare, witnessed extensive casualties and was
himself wounded, he gives hints of being one of those who, as Brown puts it, ‘complained a
lot’ and ‘left for home’ (or took leave in Lister’s case) ‘as soon as they could’. His journal
begins:
1819 August – left London in the Brig Jane for St Thomas on my way to Colombia with a Commission
as Cadet in the lancers of the Irish Legion dated 5 July 1819 from General Devereux with a promise of
48
Russell Maddicks, ‘British academic sheds light on foreign volunteers’, In Humboldt’s
Footsteps, July 2007.
49
‘Brown remarks on the emergence of a cult of the adventurer in the early nineteenth
century, and links the recruits’ enthusiasm to a renewed emphasis on military service and
national identity in Britain itself during the Napoleonic wars, the influence of Romanticism
and an idealized notion of liberty, and an emphasis on heroic service to the homeland (or
patria) as an intrinsic characteristic of Atlantic masculinity’, Karen Racine, review of Brown,
in Irish Migration Studies in Latin America, November 2007. Perhaps not all, but some of
these motivations might have applied to our ancestor. See p 14 on Joshua Montefiore.
50
The legacy of the Irish is mixed. ‘The ones who made it up the Orinoco to the plains
quickly learned that making war in that faraway terrain was no easy way to earn money.
Their contributions made a great difference in that precise moment in history. Bolivar was
convinced of it. He was known to say that the real Liberator of Spanish America was his
recruiting agent in London, Luis Lopez Mendez’, Arana.

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a Lieutenancy on my safely delivering some dispatches to Bolivar from Generals Bergara & Penilvar –
had several letters of introduction from Mr Jaffray to General Inglish, Colonels Stopford, Blossett and
Ustler - letter of credit on Gruner & Co. of St Thomas for £25 – two fellow passengers, Lt. Beverhoult
of the 56th an excellent gentlemanly fellow, Mr Linds, a little disagreeable Jew who was intolerable all
the voyage – the Master of the ship an uneducated brute gave us putrid meat and stinking water all the
voyage.
And concludes abruptly:
1829 26 Sept went in the Steamer from the Tower to Calais and thence to Paris 28 Nov left Paris for
Bordeaux 1 Dec left at Bordeaux 3 left Bordeaux for Paris 6th left Paris for Calais 11th arrived at
Dover.51
This document covers 10 years of Jayme’s life and it may have been followed by other volumes
which we don’t have. It alternates between providing great detail, though often without
supporting commentary, and skipping infuriatingly over great slabs of time. We have no record
of Lister’s response to the imperishable experience of finding himself in a new continent or
seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time; of the strangeness and difficulties of life, movement
and combat along the steaming equatorial coasts, under the biblical rains of the Colombian
uplands, immersed in Humboldt’s ‘optical magic’ on the Orinoco or on the vast, scorching
savannah; nor of the thrill of crossing the high sierra of Peru (other than that of being ‘senseless
from cold’). Nevertheless the material it contains illuminates part of a life, as well as giving
short, vivid descriptions of military activities in Bolivar’s campaigns, and some personal, if
brief, reflections on people and places. The writing reveals a well-educated man and one caught
by the errant winds of adventure.52 It has had the advantage, as well, of inspiring study of the
revolutionary upheavals in the early 19th century across the continent of South America, which
are not widely known on this side of the Pacific.53
The references to Lister’s fellow passengers on the brig Jane are perhaps illustrative of
his observations of people. Lieutenant Beverhoult is an ‘excellent gentlemanly fellow’ while
Mr Linds is a ‘little disagreeable Jew’ – intolerably so. And the captain was ‘an uneducated
brute’. It is clear that Jayme identifies wholly with his station in life as an English ‘gentleman’,
and has readily adopted what would have been the typical attitude of this class to Jews. This
was only three years after his conversion. And he presents himself as entirely superior to the
captain.
The diary reveals a lot of travel, frequently over immense distances, for purposes of
military engagement and for personal or unstated reasons. Finally, in December 1823, Lister
wrote to Bolivar from Lambayeque in northwestern Peru seeking permission to retire from the
51
Transcribed from a copy of the hand-written original by Leigh Etherden.
52
There is a touch of Joseph Conrad in Jayme Lister’s journal: the distant, godforsaken
settings, the armed exiles in up-river and estuarine ports, the lurking privateers, the dangers
and political intrigues.
53
A road in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, north of Sydney, is named Liberator General
San Martin Drive, after the liberator of Argentina. One of few such references in Australia, it
remains a source of bewilderment to many visitors, nearly 70 years after the road was so
named as a gesture of goodwill towards Argentina.

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service and requesting a passport. An American resident with whom Lister was staying
arranged ‘asylum at a Sugar Estate belonging to Jose Le Guia about 25 leagues from
Lambayeque’. Here he remained for about three months awaiting Bolivar’s answer and the
passport, which eventually arrived.
Not long afterwards Lister (or Levy) sailed back to England, leaving Valparaiso, Chile
on 4 July 1824 on the brig Lima, with a ticket bought with borrowed money, a voyage which
would have taken him through the treacherous Strait of Magellan. His journal shows that he
turned up at Worlingworth on 1 January 1825, presumably visiting members of his family; on
5 January he went to London, thence Hereford Hill where he met the Colombian ambassador,
a Mr Kurtah, possibly to report on developments or protagonists; he was in the company of an
Ayala who he then took ‘to Hereford Hill to live’, and to see John Hayes (whom we assume is
his brother-in-law, married to his sister Louisa), thence to Brighton to see ‘Father and Mother’;
back to London and the dentist, riding with various ladies, including Esther da Costa. Thence
to Portsmouth where his younger brother Alex came to bid him farewell. He then boarded the
Swedish brig Christoval Colon Palender on a free passage, bound for Cartagena on the
Caribbean coast of Colombia. The ship finally set sail on 14 February.
After his return to Colombia, Lister travelled widely, before going on to Port-au-Prince,
Haiti, where he found work in a counting house, probably as James Levy. On 5 September
1826 he was appointed British vice-consul in Haiti. The diary briefly mentions various events
and misadventures in the Caribbean, until 12 July 1828 when he leaves Port-au-Prince aboard
an ‘American Schooner’ for Philadelphia.
7. ADVENTURING IN SOUTH AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN WITH JAYME

LISTER: DETAIL
AT THIS POINT we might consider how much we should report on Levy’s time in South
America. It was only a few years in a long life, but they remain the only years for which we
have a diary, and, as well, it was his movement during those years which took him to Mexico
where he married our great-great grandmother, Sarah Green, and where they produced their
first child, and to the United States where most of the next generation were born. Also,
following Napoleon’s suggestion, the times and the activities are revealing of the man: this was
very likely a transformative period. Finally, it is possible that Levy’s decision to go to South
America as a mercenary may have been part of a well thought-out plan, to make contacts and
to enable him to better establish himself in the New World, perhaps in future post-imperial
republics. Indeed, it may have been at the suggestion of other family members, already in the
Americas. There are, then, good reasons for covering the South American ‘adventuring’ in
detail.
The Irish Legion in which Levy enlisted, as Lister, in 1819 was a controversial force of
several thousand volunteers recruited in Dublin, Belfast and Cork between 1819 and 1821.54
54
John Devereux began recruitment of the Irish Legion in Dublin in 1819. The accoutrements
of his mission included an engraved sword, now held in the Museo Bolivariano in Caracas,

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Simon Bolivar waged an extraordinary war through forbidding terrain and climates
between 1810 and 1825. By 1819 Venezuela and much of New Granada (Colombia) had been
liberated. Without the commanding, Napoleon-like figure of Bolivar it is doubtful that such
victories would have been achieved. Together with General Jose de San Martin, a hero of both
Argentina and Peru, and Bernardo O’Higgins, the liberator of Chile, he was pivotal in the
ending of Spanish rule in South America.55 Strangely, only Brazil amongst major countries,
remained resistant to this anti-colonial surge, with the Portuguese king, Dom Pedro, bizarrely
establishing himself, in exile from the ravages of Napoleon, as emperor of Brazil.
In rich language Bolivar presents the challenge of the country through which his forces
battled:
Your liberators have arrived from the banks of the swollen Magdalena to the flowering valleys of
Aragua and the precincts of this great capital, victorious they have crossed the rivers of Zulia, of
Tachira, of Bocono … they have made their way over the deserts and mountains of Ocana, Merida …
they have triumphed seven times in the battles of Cucata, La Grita, Betijoque … and have left beaten
five armies, which to the number of 10,000 men were devastating the fair provinces of Santa Marta,
Pamplona, Merida … and Caracas.56
And this refers only to Venezuela; the revolution raged for almost a decade longer through
New Grenada and into Peru.
The best known of the Irish soldiers was Brigadier General Daniel Florence O’Leary
who was a confidant and aide-de-camp to Bolivar throughout the war. After Bolivar’s death it
was O’Leary who organized his papers (disobeying Bolivar who had wanted them destroyed)
as well as writing his own memoir of the revolution. His material has been an invaluable source
for historians of the times. However, as for the Irish and British legions, neither biography of
Bolivar mentions them in great detail, focusing mainly on exceptional individuals. This
suggests that the overall impact of the mercenary forces was modest, though as we have seen,
there were several occasions where, after tough combat, Bolivar was drawn to liberally praise
them.
Simon Bolivar, from a long-established, wealthy Venezuelan family was a profoundly
complex character; in Lynch’s words: ‘He was a revolutionary who freed six countries, an
intellectual who argued the principles of national liberation, a general who fought a cruel
colonial war. He inspired extremes of devotion and detestation.’57
Venezuela, and a ceremonial Irish Legion Seal, now housed in the Museo Nacional in
Bogota, Colombia.
55
Simon Bolivar's nickname was ‘Iron arse’. By the end of his passionate, engaged life (he
was 46 when he died of tuberculosis in 1830) he had ridden over 120,000 kilometres up and
down the Andes, crossing the continent time and again, to end Spanish rule in half of South
America (Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia).
56
John Lynch, Simon Bolivar, A Life.
57
The French aristocrat, General Gilbert du Motier Lafayette, who fought in both the French
and American revolutions, wrote warmly to Bolivar, praising him lavishly. In Arana’s words,
‘Bolivar had accomplished more than Washington; he had freed his people in far more
difficult circumstances. North American revolutionaries had been uniformly white, after all;
and their values had been shared ideals, their faith overwhelmingly Protestant. In South

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It is perhaps understandable why Irishmen would want to fight against Spanish colonial
tyranny even those who had fought for the British against Napoleon’s armies, but less so why
a cosmopolitan Englishman such as James Levy would want to do so, other than in the spirit
of adventure.58 He was 23 when he enlisted. The wars against France ended in 1815 with the
Battle of Waterloo, so there were fewer opportunities to enlist in the British forces at home,
though India, Mauritius, the Cape Colony, a whole shoal of islands in the British West Indies
and, indeed, the Australian colonies, might have provided openings in the forces or
administration. It may be that his recruitment as an officer would have been restricted by his
being born Jewish. But while Jews could not be commissioned as officers in the British armed
forces, they could do so if converted.
It seems improbable that Levy was republican in spirit, and although he spent much
time in the USA, he eventually settled in the most loyal British colony of all and there is no
evidence of his having any interest in overthrowing the crown in Australia. In fact the Laurence
family, as it now was, rapidly attached itself to the Anglican ascendancy in their new country.
John Devereux, the founder of and inspiration for the Irish Legion, was born in
Wexford, Ireland in 1778. By 1815 he had useful connections with family members in
Maryland which gave him access and insight into developments throughout the Americas, and
he found himself fervently attracted to the cause of independence. In baroque language,
expressing himself in the third person, he wrote to Bolivar to offer his support: ‘against the
impious and degrading despotism that sought to reduce this noble country (New Granada) from
planetary significance to the low condition of a provincial satellite of old Spain … He is filled
with horror at seeing the monster of Spanish despotism, like an immense snake stained with
the butchery committed in the New World and trying to satiate its ferocity and quench its thirst
with the same entrails and the blood of these people; a people who should have risen once and
for all to rank among the highest nations of the Earth, eliciting admiration and envy as did
North America.’59
Over 1700 Irishmen (and others such as Lister) enlisted in the first recruiting drives,
crossing the Atlantic in a fleet of contracted ships. According to Brown, these adventurers
arrived in Spanish America at the wrong time and in the wrong place. By 1819 the Spanish
army was increasingly demoralised, and perilously isolated from reinforcements from Europe.
Simon Bolivar and other rebel leaders had already begun to question the wisdom of recruiting
large numbers of foreign mercenaries who needed barracks, provisions, payment and
weapons.60
America on the other hand, Bolivar had cobbled liberty from a gallimaufry of peoples and
races; and he had done so by “sheer dint of talent, tenacity and valor.”’
58
General Francis O’Connor expresses a quintessentially Irish perspective: ‘I have come to
South America to practise the art of war in order that I might use my new-found skills in the
liberation of Ireland from British rule.’ Brown.
59
Brown.
60
As noted by one foreign observer: ‘Weapons wore out, broke or became unusable and were
never replaced. Officers complained that their troops did not have weapons or their weapons
were in a total state of disrepair. Men went into battle without weapons and picked them from
among fallen comrades. They quickly wore through their shoes and uniforms, which were
never replaced because generals lacked money for supplies.’

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Jayme Lister’s diary has him with a commission as a cadet in the Irish Legion dated 5
July 1819 from General Devereux, ‘with the promise of a lieutenancy upon my safely
delivering some dispatches to Bolivar from Generals Bergara and Penilvar’.61 He had several
letters of introduction, and a ‘letter of credit on Gruner and Co of St Thomas (in the Virgin
Islands) for 25 pounds’.
Lister was ill with fever in St Thomas, and had a ‘very dear three weeks’ stay with a
widow. He meets various members of the legion who have escaped from the Spanish
‘flecheras’, armed barge-like vessels, and who had ‘suffered great cruelties from the
Spaniards’. This would have convinced him that this was no boys’ own adventure he was
headed for, but a very serious crusade. He proceeded with a Lieutenant Ferguson 62 (one of the
escapees) for Margarita in the Colombian privateer Hornet. He arrived at Juan Griego in Isla
Margarita on 2 October and delivered his dispatches to Admiral Brion, Bolivar being away in
Angostura, and with this he was promoted to lieutenant with the lancers.63
His first military activity followed: ‘marched to Pampatar with part of the Irish legion,
was put on Admiral Brion’s staff, he being then Commander in Chief’.64 In December Colonel
Mariano Montilla arrived from Angostura and took command of the land forces.65 ‘Col
Stopford appointed Chief of Staff and I was put in orders as 1st adjutant of the Staff’, and on
28 December Lister was ‘promoted Capt of Cavalry by Brion subject to Bolivar’s approval’.
This seems very rapid promotion for someone who may have had no military training.
But the Bolivarian army could have been like other armies with the officer class receiving
commissions based on connections more than military experience, or, more likely, the attrition
rate for all ranks was very high.
On 6 March 1820, Lister embarked with the ‘whole legion’ at Juan Griego, on the
expedition to attack and take ‘Rio de la Hache’66 and on 9 March they disembarked at 3am and
had taken the town by daylight, with only slight resistance. On 20 March he set out with the
‘whole division of 1800 on a march into the interior of 56 leagues’ (311km) as far as Valle de
61
There is a view that Lister may have been engaged on a bleak-sounding commission
known as a ‘forlorn hope’. This is from the Dutch ‘verloren hoop’ meaning ‘lost troop’. In
essence the recruit joins a regiment with a high attrition rate, and is hoping for promotion to
an officer’s rank in the event of the deaths of others.
62
There is a possibility that the 23 year old James Levy was sent to South America – William
Ferguson, from Antrim in Ireland, was by his own account ‘headstrong and difficult’ and got
into financial difficulties, so he was ‘sent to South America on a commission in Simon
Bolivar’s army in 1818’ at age 18, as a second lieutenant; he became a colonel in 1828.
Unfortunately, he was shot dead by conspirators trying to kill Bolivar in September that year.
63
Margarita was the venue for Bolivar announcing in 1816, ‘There will be no more slaves in
Venezuela, except those who wish to remain so. All those who prefer liberty to repose will
take up arms to defend their sacred rights and they will be citizens.’
64
Luis Brion was a young Dutch Jew from Curacao ‘with a lust for adventure … one of a
network of freewheeling Caribbean businessmen from whom Bolivar had bought arms’; the
latter proclaimed him ‘America’s best friend’. Arana.
65
General Mariano Montilla and his brother Tomas were boyhood friends of Bolivar, and
were amongst the most loyal of Bolivar’s supporters.
66
Riohacha, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, near the border with Venezuela. .

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Upar 67 where they expected to form a junction with the army coming from Maracaibo with
Bolivar; ‘… had several skirmishes with the Indians in taking the different towns … got
wounded in the left arm’.68
Then ‘a division under Col. Garcia who was following in our rear with a supply of arms
and ammunition was surprised at Moreno and almost all cut to pieces. Lost many of our men
from fatigue and thirst. Remained 3 weeks at Valle de Upar and then returned to Rio de la
Hache fighting our way through the Indians all the way – during the whole of this march the
enemy was in our advance rear flanks.’
May – arrived at Rio de la Hache, May 10 – appointed Aide de Camp to General Montilla.
May 23 action of Laguna Salada about a mile from Rio de la Hache. Spanish force under Sanchez Lima
3000, ours 1200, after five hours formation in front of the enemy with partial firing and several fruitless
attempts on their part to break our square, we retired to Rio de la Hache and there remained day and
night under arms until the morning.
May 25 when we sallied out and after 4 hours hard fighting completely defeated the enemy, which was
concluded by a charge from the foot lancers at the point of the bayonet, commanded by Colonel
O’Connor. I received five wounds during the action – two balls were extracted on the field by Dr
Fitzgibbon and two by Dr. Byrne in the Hospital at Rio de la Hache the same day.69
June – evacuated Rio de la Hache after burning the town and blowing up the forts. The town was set on
fire through the intrigues of Brion and Montilla and the blame all laid to the Irish, who consequently
were sent off to Jamaica under charge of Colonels O’Connor and Stopford, 600 men.
Rum was secretly placed in the barracks in order that the soldiers might get drunk and follow the
example of the boat’s crew of Brion’s vessel who began setting fire to the outermost houses and as the
whole of the houses were built of wood and thatch, they soon communicated (caught fire). Brion and
Montilla had sent their baggage on board overnight, we remained two days in the roads and then
proceeded with the remainder of the Irish, about 200 dispersed in the different vessels of the squadron,
to Savanilla70 province of Cartagena making a false attack on Santa Marta on our way which we might
easily have taken had we had troops to disembark – here the 600 men would have been invaluable’.
This is how historian Matthew Brown describes the Riohacha debacle:
The attack on Riohacha did briefly serve, as Bolívar had hoped it would, to distract some Spanish and
Royalist forces. In all other respects it was a spectacular failure. Planning, discipline and strategy fell
apart in Riohacha. On sight of the expedition's ships massing outside the port, Riohacha's residents fled
for the hills. The Irish Legion therefore was able to occupy the port without difficulty, and was then
overwhelmed by disciplinary problems on a march into the New Granadan interior. Fear of being
ambushed by local indigenous peoples combined with lack of food and drink to create a rebellious
atmosphere amongst the men. This erupted upon their return to Riohacha, where some waiting merchant
vessels from the British-ruled island of Jamaica offered to transport disgruntled adventurers away from
Colombia. After rioting and setting fire to many of the town's buildings, the vast majority of the Irish
Legion embarked and left Mariano Montilla, Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Paula Santander to rue
their ultimately costly and demoralising decision to recruit Irishmen to their cause.
The follow-up to these events in Ireland is interesting because there are substantially
different versions of what happened; returning volunteers ‘blamed the Spanish American
leaders, particularly Luis Brion and Mariano Montilla, for causing the Irish Legion's
67
Town in northeast Colombia.
68
Fear of Native Americans was said to be strong amongst the foreign recruits.
69
Colonel ‘Francisco’ O’Connor was an Irish officer highly valued by Bolivar.
70
Near Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast of Colombia; Santa Marta is to the northeast.

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indiscipline by leaving it “disarmed, betrayed and plundered”. Others blamed the Irish officers
for their poor personnel management.’71 Lister himself refers to ‘the intrigues of Brion and
Montilla’.
By deserting the battle at Riohacha, the Irish had raised doubts about their commitment
to their own developing national identity. In 1820, a public inquiry was set up in Dublin to
investigate accusations of ‘unmanly and dishonourable’ behaviour against John Devereux and
his associates. Some of the deserting adventurers were accused of being ‘too fond of good
living, with no stomach for the fight’, and as possessing no sustained commitment to liberty.
For our purposes, we can assume that this matter of Irish honour had nothing to do with Lister;
we can only speculate that as an ‘outsider’ in England he had decided to thrice distance himself
– once in assuming a new identity, twice in fighting with the liberty-defending Irish, who
habitually were regarded with haughty disdain by the English, and a third time in doing so
against an imperial power and an ally of Britain.
The diary resumes after the chaos at Riohacha:
I was on board an American Chartered Schooner Kate with the baggage and wounded and was nearly
sunk by approaching too near the batteries. We were also fired into by the Colombian privateer
Esperanta – Capt. Block who thought we were going over to the enemy.
Anchored off Savanilla at about 6 pm, all the vessels with the Spanish colours flying, which completely
deceived the troops in the fort. Landed with 300 men at 4 in the morning and took the fort by surprise,
no preparations having been made for its defence so sure were they that we were Spaniards.
Had a quarrel with General Montilla and was sent for two months a prisoner in the fort of Savanilla for
sending him a challenge. On being released, demanded my passport for Jamaica which was granted.
An interesting development occurs now, where Lister changes his mind about leaving for
Jamaica and enlists in the cavalry:
The moment I was leaving for Jamaica, the enemy was reported to be on their march towards the town,
so I gave up all idea of embarking and entered as a volunteer in the Cavalry under Capt. Warner and
that same day attacked the advance guard of the enemy at Pueblo Nuevo, consisting of a Spanish
Squadron of Cavalry and 2 Comp. of infantry which we completely defeated, killing 13 and taking 7
prisoners – we lost 5 and 17 wounded. Our force, 1 Troop of Cavalry (30) and 1 Company of
Margaritanians (100).
10 Oct – marched as Captain of the light company of the Battalion Girardot72 against Santa Marta. The
division consisted of the Rifle Battalion, Col. Sandes, 800, and two Companies of Girardot, 180
(Grenadiers and Cazadores73); the remainder of the Battalion went by water to attack with the gun boats.
General Carreno commanded the expedition.
71
The Irish became synonymous with indiscipline after the rebellion and mutiny at Riohacha.
According to one contemporary account: ‘They were often dead drunk … the Irish, Scots and
English in Venezuela fought with a rifle in one hand and a bottle in the other’. Arana
72
Town in Colombia.
73
Light infantry.

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It may now be useful to note the recollections of Charles Stuart Cochrane. 74 ‘I cannot
take leave of the Irish Legion without mentioning one of its most distinguished officers,
Colonel Lyster, who was employed in the province of Coro and there underwent the greatest
privations’, Cochrane notes. ‘In one of the various actions in which he was engaged, a patriot
colonel rashly charged the enemy’s line of cavalry alone and got into their rear where he would
have been killed or taken prisoner had not Colonel Lyster dashed through the same line after
him, where they both most gallantly cut their way through the enemy, and rejoined their own
party in safety’. Might the gallant Colonel Lyster be our man?
From his own account, Lister seems to have enjoyed varied military ranks, and was
commissioned as lieutenant colonel, ‘with Brevet rank of Colonel’, though not until November
1823.75 No dates are given in the Cochrane document. We have seen as well that Lister was
involved in brutal combat and received wounds on several occasions. It is conceivable that he
was engaged in Coro province of Gran Colombia; it lies between Isla Margarita (in the east of
the country) and Riohacha province; however there is no corroborating evidence. If nothing
else, the Cochrane account illustrates the perilous nature of the fighting.
3 Nov – action of Rio Frio in the night, routed the enemy.

10 - action of the Cienaga, 7 leagues from Santa Marta. Slight contusion from a spent ball in the left
side.
11 – ordered out with 200 men to collect the dead and burn them keeping an exact acct. of them; 820
in all including those in the streets and houses of the town. Collected 86 dead bodies and put them into
a small hut about 200 yards from the town and set fire to it, but the wind being directly towards the
town, great alarm was entertained for the whole town and I never in the whole of my life was in such a
funk.
20 Nov – Santa Marta capitulated and we entered without a shot. 28 Nov obtained 2 months leave of
absence and went to Jamaica with Dr Maine.
1821
15 Jan - arrived at Santa Marta from Jamaica.
1822
Feb – embarked at Cartagena for Portobello76 commanding the Cazadores of the Girardot Regiment.
Went round to Chagres, the regiment went up the (Chagres) river in boats to Cruces, the Cybelle British
Frigate, Capt. Jos. Rowley accompanied us to Portobello.
1 Apr - entered Panama.
Lister then appears to spend a year in Panama; there are no journal entries at all, but it might,
nevertheless, have been an active time, possibly with further prisoner transports.
74
Charles Stuart Cochrane, Journals of Residence and Travels in Colombia, 1825. Elsewhere
in his book Cochrane observes that, besides the English and Irish legions, ‘there were several
other independent corps; some Lancers, others Hussars, others Rifles, &c &c; in short, fine
names, and still more, fine uniforms, brought numerous fine-looking recruits …’
75
Brevet promotions are temporary. As readers of novelists such as Jorge Amado and Gabriel
Garcia Marquez will know, ‘colonels’ proliferate in the steamy latitudes of Latin America,
not to mention in the US south; however it would be irregular for a brevet colonel to retain
the rank after retirement from service.
76
Seaport in Panama on the Caribbean coast.

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1823
28 March, embarked at Panama for Guayaquil (Ecuador) in charge of 200 prisoners sent from Santa
Marta, 15 days water and provisions on board.
11 April, arrived at Guayaquil and delivered prisoners over to Bolivar and embarked next morning for
Callao (Peru) with the expedition as Capt. of the 8th Company of Rifles. 180 of the prisoners drafted in
the different companies of the Rifles
13 May, landed at Callao with the Regiment 15 Sept. Obtained Brevet rank of Lt. Colonel.
15 Oct left Lima in the night to join Riva Aguero who was at Truxillo.77 Passed the Cordilleras.
Perpetual snow – two days senseless from cold. Two Limenian Lieutenants and Captain Herrera of my
company accompanied me. Arrived at Huamanga in the Sierra.78 Advance Guard of Riva Aguero
commanded by General Noboa who detained me accusing me of being a spy of Bolivar – put me in
irons and kept me 25 days in a dungeon deprived of communication. Herrera in a separate one. Released
by order of Riva Aguero and marched in for Truxillo through Parco Santa Fe.79
23 Nov arrived at Truxillo and received commission as Lt. Col. with Brevet rank of Colonel. Ordered
off to Piura through Lambayeque (Peru).
10 Dec wrote to Bolivar from Lambayeque on my return from Piura and dated the letter from Paita.
Remained a few days at Mr Fanning’s, an American, many years resident there, and through whom I
obtained an asylum at a Sugar Estate belonging to Jose Le Guia about 25 leagues from Lambayeque,
where I remained about 3 months waiting an answer of my letter to Bolivar, and when it arrived
enclosing my permission to retire from the Service and passport according to my request.
1824
I proceeded to the port of Pacasmayo (Peru) and embarked on board the Brig Gratitude for Valparaiso
and whilst laying there at anchorage Capt. Wright and Capt. Morgell came in with part of the Rifles on
board. They were on the eve of putting me in irons and taking me on board their vessel, but to their
great astonishment I produced Bolivar’s passport when the tables changed, and they were particularly
kind – furnished me with some clothes (I being then almost naked) and 2 dubloons.
Lister then sailed on 24 February for Valparaiso in Chile, ‘passage free’, arriving on 31 March
after five weeks at sea. On 4 July he left for England on the brig Lima, a passage costing 60
pounds, with money being advanced by a George Dowel.
We have seen earlier what Levy did during his time in England in 1824 and early 1825.
At the end of his stay the minor annoyances and delays of travel in the days of sail present
themselves when the Swedish brig Christoval Colon Palender, ‘being at the motherbank’, a
vast shallow sandbar used as an anchorage by merchant ships off Portsmouth, Levy was on
board with a free passage to Cartagena, Colombia, courtesy of a Mr Housewolff, but the ship
was ‘wind bound’, so he came ashore and took the night coach to London, went to Hereford
Hill briefly, perhaps to see his sister Louisa, or the mysterious Ayala, and then returned to
Portsmouth the next night and re-boarded his ship. After another delay when the Christoval
77
Trujillo: the oldest of the Spanish cities built by the Spanish conquerors of Peru, founded
by Francisco Pizarro in 1535.
78
High altitude region of Peru, with peaks up to 5000 metres.
79
Jose Mariano de la Riva Aguero was a soldier and, controversially, twice president of Peru.
The campaigns of Bolivar and San Martin in Peru were in an environment swarming with
enemies and fraught with treachery and madness. Peru is ‘a chamber of horrors’, wrote
Bolivar. Lister’s incarceration might be considered an unfortunate consequence.

Murray Laurence
Colon anchored at the Needles (at the western edge of the Isle of Wight), where there was a
masquerade for ‘all hands, Captain, passengers and crew’, the journey to Cartagena
recommenced on 14 March.
Despite the fun of the masquerade, Jayme arrived in Cartagena on 3 April ill with
rheumatism, and a day later had to be carried ashore in a hammock to Dr Da Costa.80 He must
have been very ill, or otherwise preoccupied, for his diary resumes six months later on 2
October when he leaves Cartagena for Santa Marta, then on 10 October he arrived at
Barranquilla, where he stayed six days, departing with ‘hampers of goods’ for various people.
He then travelled widely in Colombia until May 1826; we don’t know what for, but assuredly
for more important work than distributing hampers, unless these represented a business
opportunity. Lister had received his passport and presumably retired from military service
before his trip to England, so we can only speculate that his extensive movement through much
of 1825 and 1826 must have been for business or a consequence of his meeting with the
Colombian ambassador in London. The travel to these coastal towns whether by sea or
horseback would have been arduous.
The diary for 1826 begins on 12 January with Lister arriving at Honda, Colombia,
where on 16 January he finds himself ‘put into the common jail for three days for having
horsewhipped the ferryman, by the Commandant at Honda’, suggesting an arrogance on the
part of our ancestor, out of keeping with the egalitarian fervor of the times.
Not much more is reported for January and in February; Lister is in Bogota until 9 April
before returning to Santa Marta and then by sea to Jacmel, Haiti, a journey taking nine days.
On 15 June he arrived in the capital Port-au-Prince and entered Maunder Brothers Counting
House.81
On 5 September Levy was appointed vice-consul in Haiti by Mr Mackenzie, the British
consul-general. Haiti had been independent of France since 1804 when, in a classic case of
colonial blowback, France’s own revolution inspired Toussaint Louverture’s slave revolt,
transforming Saint-Domingue into the world’s first black republic, and only the second
independent, post-imperial republic in the western hemisphere after the United States: ‘Haiti
was founded on the ashes of what had been, fifteen years before, the most profitable slave
colony in the world, its birth premised on the self-evident truth that no one should be a slave.’82
Levy’s consular duties included travelling about the country, and visiting nearby
Jamaica with dispatches for people such as George Canning, secretary of state for foreign
affairs, and the Duke of Manchester. Conceivably, Levy used the position to further contacts
throughout the Caribbean and North America as the consular role included trade negotiations
and political representation.
80
Probably a relative; Simha’s will leaves a mourning ring to her ‘brother-in-law, Mr G da
Costa’. In December 1821, James arrived in Jamaica and ‘benefitted Henry Da Costa’. In
January 1825, in England, he ‘took a ride with Esther Da Costa’. The Da Costas were a
prominent and globally dispersed Sephardic clan, like the Montefiores.
81
We do not know what name our ancestor used in Haiti, though communication between
him and the British government is said to exist. I will refer to him as Levy.
82
Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World, The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Harvard
University Press, 2004.

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On 2 February 1827 he reports that the arsenal in Port-au-Prince exploded, minutes

after a visit by the president, Jean-Pierre Boyer. Levy then moved around Haiti and to Santo
Domingo in the Spanish Dominican Republic which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti,
and which then was under Haitian occupation. The ‘Black Republic of Haiti’83 was a potent
inspiration to enslaved and subjugated peoples everywhere that it became known, and it would
be interesting to have Levy’s thoughts on this and the nature of the society in which he lived
for about two years; or even on the pre-revolutionary history of the island – Hispaniola has the
distinction of hosting the first European ‘settlement’ in the western hemisphere: in 1492
Christopher Columbus left a small group of sailors in the care of an indigenous community –
alas the journal’s entries are brief, and its tone is entirely prosaic.84
In 1828 Levy quit his consular post, leaving Port-au-Prince on 12 July for Philadelphia
and then moving onwards to New York, arriving on 25 July. On 1 August he took a ship, the
Electra, for London; she caught fire after being struck by lightning on 8 August and the crew
and passengers ‘threw part of the cargo overboard and extinguished it after much fright.’ They
arrived in Plymouth on 1 September and then he proceeded to London.
And so the diary ends, on 11 December 1829 when Levy landed at Dover, after visiting
France.
Jayme Lister’s experiences in South America, for which he provides meagre
background or rationale, do seem to be a series of dire predicaments and near catastrophes. He
suffered grave illness and severe wounding, engaged in fierce fighting, using and facing the
full range of fearful weapons of the day – muskets, sabres, bayonets, canon, lances – had
experiences which terrified him (‘I never in my whole life was in such a funk’), was involved
in the burning of corpses and whole towns, was fired upon at sea by a Colombian privateer
when his ship was thought to be ‘going over to the enemy’, and endured a shipboard fire and
imprisonment; he also had charge of prisoners including a rifles company into which prisoners
had been drafted, in a war in which captives were brutally treated by both sides. In early 1824
he found ‘asylum at a Sugar estate’ for three months, presumably because without the passport
which he had requested from Bolivar, he would be held as a deserter, which he was shortly
afterwards when he was almost clamped in irons again until he produced the passport. We
don’t know whether he habitually wore a ‘fine uniform’ as observed by Charles Cochrane (see
page 29) but when released Lister was ‘almost naked’. It is a surprise that he wasn’t gravely
wounded or taken prisoner (other than by his own officers); indeed, that he survived at all
suggests good luck, given the pervasive craziness and the appalling casualty toll on both sides.
In all likelihood Lister fought bravely and displayed leadership skills sufficient for him
to be rewarded with significant promotions from his original commission as a cadet.
We are no clearer on the motivations of recruits such as Lister. He was not Irish and
presumably had no sympathy for the rebellious spirits of the Irish which Devereux and others
83
‘If we live in a world in which democracy is meant to exclude no one, it is in no small part
because of the actions of those slaves in Saint-Domingue who insisted that human rights were
theirs too.’ Dubois.
84
Symbolically, the first European settlement in the Americas was consumed by violence and
obliterated within a year.

Murray Laurence
express so extravagantly.85 Equally we don’t know why he wished to support South Americans
in their campaigns for independence. Unfortunately we only have glimpses of his views in his
diary, and they give the impression of someone who had the condescending attitudes of
Englishmen of his class: a Jew was ‘disagreeable’, he whipped a ferryman, he challenged the
very senior General Montilla, who was the Venezuelan whom Bolivar had put in charge of the
Irish Legion, and nowhere does he describe the country, people and military engagements other
than in mostly matter-of-fact language. The distinctive peoples of South America are all but
invisible, other than the ‘Indians’ whom he had to fight. He may have been a young hothead –
in 1820 he was 24 – who found military discipline difficult, and so he spent time in the lock-
up, three days in one case, two months in another (the third stay, in solitary confinement in a
‘dungeon’, in irons, occurred when he was absurdly mistaken as a spy for Bolivar, collateral
damage in the internecine conspiracies in Peru).
Whatever his ambitions and motivations, upon his release, he made his way to Haiti
where he found a society and an occupation which seem more his style, in a counting house
and then as vice-consul.
8. MARRIAGE OF JAMES LISTER LAURENCE AND SARAH HENRIETTA GREEN IN

MEXICO
JAMES LEVY THEN SPENT SOME YEARS IN ENGLAND, during which time he probably fell in with
his brothers and took up the name Laurence, when he was aged 35 or 36.86 He then sailed again
for the United States, arriving on 10 July 1835. That year he married Sarah Henrietta Green in
Tampico, Mexico. Certainly by this time that he was calling himself James Lister Laurence, as
noted on a Mexican document (see below). Tampico was the setting for the Battle of Tampico
in November 1835, part of an uprising against the centralist government and its liberal reforms,
involving American volunteers and seditious cells in New Orleans. It seems unlikely that
Laurence took part in this, 10 years after his involvement in Colombia; also most of those who
invaded were caught and executed.
There is no known connection with Mexico that would have taken James Laurence
there. The Montefiore clan, however, had a most consequential connection almost three
centuries earlier. Simon Sebag Montefiore has discovered that his ancestor, Luis Carvajal,
became a governor in the late 16th century of Nuevo Leon province in Mexico, then known as
New Spain, where Jews were tolerated, as they were throughout the Spanish American colonies
85
‘Devereux portrayed himself as an Irish general fleeing religious persecution in Britain and
seeking honour and glory fighting against tyranny in the Spanish world’. Another Irish
soldier, John Johnston (receiver of a hamper from Lister), expresses the sentiment well,
‘being from a country like Ireland, that has always been struggling to be free, I acquired at
birth the most liberal sentiments that could possibly fill a man's heart … so that when … I
heard favourable talk of a Heroic Bolivar and his glorious struggle … against the tyranny and
despotism of Spain … at that moment my heart inflamed with the ardent desire to join such a
noble cause’. Brown.
86
The pressure applied to James (and his brothers) to change his surname to the remote
Laurence must have been immense. It was the maiden name of Joseph’s wife’s grandmother.

Murray Laurence
– for a time. Quite probably the Montefiores as a family were conversant with and proud of
their family history – Carvajal’s escape from the Inquisition in Spain, brief success in the New
World, haunting demise, and his descendants’ flight to Italy and resurrection as Montefiores
would have been one of the grand stories told across the generations, as it was pivotal to their
survival as a family.87
Unfortunately we know very little about Sarah Green, other than that she was
supposedly born in Leeds, a small village in Kent, England, in 1819, and was 15 years and 10
months old when she married James. According to her death certificate, her mother’s name and
maiden name are unknown, while her father is referred to simply as ‘Green’. The Greens may
well have been Jewish, Green(e) being a not unusual Jewish name, or an Anglicization of other
names such as Gruner.88 We have no information on what her family was doing in Mexico,
though it is quite likely that her father may have been in the consular service or business, given
the circles James mixed in. Did James travel to Mexico in order to marry a girl whom he had
previously met or was he there for some other purpose related to business or diplomacy? Was
this a marriage encouraged by their respective families? We don’t know. It is also possible that
Sarah Green was Mexican or from elsewhere in the region with her origins concealed, such is
the scant material on her family. It is extraordinary that Sarah’s offspring knew so little about
their mother, or revealed so little. In any case our great-great grandmother was very young
when she married. James was 38 or 39 at the time.
9. BIRTH OF JAMES FREDERICK IN TAMPICO AND TRAVEL TO THE UNITED

STATES
THE COUPLE REMAINED IN TAMPICO long enough for the birth of their first child, James
Frederick Laurence, on 2 June 1836. Mexican baptisms records for 1836 list ‘Jayme Federico
Laurence Laurence’ (sic); the father’s name is given as ‘Jayme Lister Laurence’ and the
mother’s as ‘Sarah Laurence De Green’. On 3 October 1836 they arrived in New Orleans,
Louisiana on the vessel Chase. Shipping records then show James arriving in New York from
Havana on the brig Olive Branch in May 1837 ‘with lady and child’, Sarah and James
Frederick.
From 1837 until 1853 the family lived in New York with some time in New Orleans
and Caracas, Venezuela. We know something of their movements from the birth records of
their children, with my great-grandfather George Massett, their fourth child, being born in New
York in 1848.
Sea and land journeys were arduous and often hazardous. We have no descriptive
account of any journey from James, other than that of the Electra, but a paragraph in Abigail
Green’s account of the Montefiore clan gives some indication of what sea travel could be like
87
The Inquisition did catch up in gruesome fashion with Luis Carvajal and his children.
Governor Luis died in prison and two of his children were burnt alive in Mexico City. The
survivors, having fled to Italy, became the Montefiores (see p 14).
88
Gruner and Co of St Thomas was the agency where James cashed his letter of credit in
1819 (see p 22). Conceivably the families knew each other.

Murray Laurence
for parents with young children: ‘These sea journeys were not to be taken lightly. In a diary he
kept on his way to Livorno in 1783, Samuel Montefiore (brother of Simha) described the daily
rigours of storm and seasickness, regularly punctuated by Jayley’s faints and Reina’s prolonged
fits of hysterics. The voyage culminated in a devastating encounter with a whirlwind shortly
before they arrived in Livorno, during which the tiller ropes broke and poor Samuel was
“knocked about like a ball from one side of the Cabbin to another.”’
New York was then the largest city in all the Americas with a population of half a
million; then as now it was a dynamic magnet for immigrants from all over the world. Its wealth
came primarily from trade based on its extensive waterways and coastal shipping. The world’s
first scheduled shipping service had begun between New York and England in 1818. Irish
immigration was huge following the famine in 1845, and German and other European
immigration was also significant. The city was a place of raw, unregulated capitalism, a sink
or swim environment where fortunes were made on the backs of abundant cheap labour. A
place where ‘wealth suddenly acquired … in all probability will be as suddenly lost.
Adventurers dash in for the spoils and the thousand and one bloodsuckers who are found in the
haunts of a corrupt city’, according to a contemporary observer.89
Unfortunately we do not know how the family lived during this period in America. This
was pre-civil war United States, Louisiana was a southern state which would soon join the
Confederacy; Laurence’s attitudes to slavery are unknown but it is hard to imagine that he
would not take a position on the most divisive and consequential issue of the times in the US,
and that he would have heard sharply divergent positions in New York and New Orleans.
10. THE GROWING LAURENCE FAMILY IN NEW YORK, CARACAS AND NEW
ORLEANS
THE US CENSUS OF OCTOBER 1850 shows the family living in New Orleans.90 James and Sarah
by then have six children: James Frederick, born in Tampico on 2 June 1836; Edward Zaccaria,
New York, 2 October 1837; Matilda Eliza, New York, 7 April 1842; Charles Albert, Caracas,
1844; George Massett, New York, 10 June 1848; and Ellen Sinclair, 1 March 1850 in New
Orleans; (their last child, Annie Glover was born in Sydney on 14 February 1854); 91 a family
built as they moved from tropical to temperate latitudes and back again, from the tropical
savannah of Tampico and Caracas, to the northern temperate climate of New York, to the
humid subtropical zone of New Orleans, to humid, temperate Sydney. Interestingly we have a
document attesting to the baptism of George Massett on 29 September 1851, when George was
89
Charles Francis Adams, writer and politician. Another observer, W.M. Thackeray, evoked
the ‘city that never sleeps’ even then: ‘There is something in the air and sun here which we
don’t experience on our side of the globe. Under this sun, people can’t sit still, can’t ruminate
over their dinners, dawdle in their studies, and be lazy and tranquil – they must keep moving,
rush from one activity to another, jump out of sleep and to their business.’ Both from P. Yapp
ed, The Travellers Dictionary of Quotation.
90
The census of ‘free inhabitants’ in the Parish of Orleans lists James and Sarah and the first
five children; the infant Ellen Sinclair was not recorded, unless on the following page.
91
Louisa Massett, born in New York on 19 October 1839, had died on 19 August 1841.

Murray Laurence
three years old, in St Paul’s church and parish, Louisiana. The godparents are given as George
Laurence (one of James’s younger brothers, or possibly a nephew, the son of his two years
older brother Benjamin) with a note in parenthesis, ‘proxy James L. Laurence’, Charles Black,
and Anna-Maria Glover. The Laurences later decided to name their youngest daughter after the
latter who was probably a resident of New Orleans. The ‘proxy’ indicates that James was absent
from this ceremony, continuing his by now habitual peregrinations in the region.
What was New Orleans like in the 1850s? At the mouth of the Mississippi it was
strategically placed for trade along the immense Mississippi-Missouri river system, and so was
the most prosperous city in the south, with a very racially mixed population of 115,000, the
fifth largest in the US. It had been the largest slave port and market in the Americas; it was
literally built by slaves, and earned revenues from sugar and cotton plantations which were
worked by slaves.
A huge cultural change to New Orleans had occurred prior to the Louisiana Purchase
in 1803 with the expulsion of thousands of French plantation owners from Saint-Domingue
(later Haiti), beginning in 1791, following the Haitian revolution. In consequence the French
émigrés included many mixed-race free mulattos – or ‘free persons of colour’ – who were well-
educated and -positioned, and were slave owners who brought their slaves with them to New
Orleans as they fled. The unusual practice (in the US) of persons seen as black by both law and
society owning their own slaves and other substantial property would continue through the
decades leading up to the civil war; most free blacks in New Orleans who owned real estate
also owned slaves. These West Indian slaves, and their immediate descendants, added to the
unique character of Louisiana.
The sale of the Louisiana Territory by France in 1803, mainly to help fund Bonaparte’s
military crusades, was an acquisition which nearly doubled the size of the United States and
gave the existing US a territory unlike any other in the union: it was Catholic, with a legal
system based on the Napoleonic Code, and populated by speakers of French and Spanish who
were much more racially mixed than elsewhere in the nation; they included Louisiana Creoles,
a blend of Native Americans, Africans, French and Spanish, and Cajuns whose origins were in
Francophone Canada.
The population of New Orleans increased rapidly between 1830 and 1850, particularly
from Germany and Ireland. Slave imports stopped after 1808, so the white population grew
faster than the black. In the census of 1850, when the Laurences are shown to be in Louisiana,
the population of New Orleans is 15.4% enslaved blacks, 5.3% other blacks, 42.8% foreign
born (races undefined) and 36.8% white.
It would be fascinating to have material that might illuminate what the now 54-year-
old James and his family thought of the society in which they found themselves, though
obviously both parents had lived in racially mixed countries and cities before, and Louisiana
and New Orleans in their cultural and linguistic heterogeneity were closer to the anarchic
diversity of Venezuela and Colombia than other US cities, even New York.
The Laurence family remained in the United States, mostly New York, from 1835 to
1853, with periods in New Orleans, Mexico and Caracas as we have seen. We now know what
James’s occupation was during at least part of this time. Vague family lore has it that he was
either a consul-general for the UK, or, even more improbably, an agent-general for the colony
of NSW. We don’t have documentary evidence to support these claims, which may have arisen

Murray Laurence
because of his position as vice-consul in Haiti. However evidence has emerged in an

autobiography written by one Stephen Massett that Laurence worked as a ‘book-keeper’ in
W.C. Pickersgill & Co in Wall Street.92 Massett refers to his being offered a position in the
firm in 1840 ‘through the kindness of an old and esteemed friend’ who he soon identifies as
‘Col.L’. These remarks suggests that Laurence was using the title colonel in America, decades
after his time in the Irish Legion, but since Laurence’s occupation on shipping records and
census data is usually ‘merchant’, or ‘gentleman’, it is possible that Massett’s referring to him
as ‘the Col’ had its origins with Massett’s brother Samuel, a doctor who may have known him
(whether as Laurence or Lister) in South America, decades earlier (see below). Of course
Laurence may have passed as a colonel or been known as such by others during the family’s
long period of residency in the US.
Massett’s book, with the crazy sounding title of Drifting About; or what Jeems Pipes
of Pipesville, Saw and Did, gives us, as well, the source of the name ‘Massett’ which was given
to James and Sarah’s son George and daughter Louisa, and has been bestowed on other
descendants of George and Alma. Stephen C. Massett was a talented if eccentric itinerant
musician who will reappear, in New South Wales, some time in the future.
Massett also gives us the only comment we have on the personality of James Laurence,
beyond the inferences we can draw from his both rebellious and arrogant behaviour in South
America, and his wife describing him as being ‘strange occasionally in his manner’ (see p 56):
‘My friend, Col L (the book-keeper) was a very facetious person.’ This seems a surprising
remark to make about a friend, but Massett goes onto explain that Laurence knew that he,
Massett, was hopeless with figures, and was ignorant of all methods of account keeping, ‘and
to this day, I believe he thought it a good joke, and inwardly enjoyed the nervous state of
excitement and agony of mind I was constantly in.’
‘The Col’ might have thought it a good joke, but the head of the firm, ‘Mr Pick’ seems
not to have got it. Massett claims that Laurence had recommended him as a junior clerk because
he was known to have ‘calligraphic powers’ which were ‘universally admired’, but these
powers were of no assistance when he was given an accounting problem of fantastic complexity
by Mr Pick. As Massett struggled with this he looked despairingly for help from the man who
had brought him to the firm, and ‘made sundry gesticulations to the Col to do it for me, but he,
the last plank to which I clung, slipped from under me, and in my hour of tribulation was
“nowhar”.’
It does seem somewhat callous of Laurence to have thrown his mathematically inept
friend in, and then abandoned him; but Massett makes no more of it, other than to call his friend
‘facetious’. We do learn that ‘WCP & Co’ is a ‘highly influential, aristocratic and wealthy
bankinghouse’, and so Laurence has obviously taken up the profession in New York for which
his father had prepared him, though at age 44 the role of book-keeper might seem humble.
Massett went on to take a legal apprenticeship at a firm also in Wall St, so it is likely that he
and ‘the Col’ continued their relationship, until Massett went to San Francisco in 1849, and the
Laurences moved to New Orleans at about the same time.93
92
W.C. Pickersgill & Co, Bankers, 49 Wall Street, New York.
It is likely that Laurence met Massett through the latter’s brother, Samuel Massett, who
93
was a doctor in Cartagena, Colombia in the 1820s. Dr Massett’s wife was the daughter of the

Murray Laurence
Certain tropes on the subject of James’s occupations have persisted, with the honorific
‘colonel’ being ever present. In a history of solicitors in NSW the section on the various
Laurence firms begins, ‘The period now reviewed was a formative one for two practices that
came to be impressed with the names of lawyer sons of a British Army officer – Colonel James
Lister Laurence, an interesting man who managed to combine the professions of soldier and
diplomat. Amongst other exploits he fought with Simon Bolivar in South America and became
a consul at New York. So it was, in the 1840s, that the elder son (Charles Albert) was born in
Caracas, Venezuela, and the younger son (George Massett) in New York. Colonel Laurence
was thereafter stationed in Sydney, arriving in 1853’. It is interesting that this document omits
the actual oldest son, James Frederick, who wasn’t a solicitor, and later caused the family some
distress; Charles was the third son (see page 47 and Endnotes).94
It is not impossible that James Laurence was a diplomat (beyond his two-year posting
in Haiti); readers of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series of 20 historical novels set during
the Napoleonic wars will know of ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin’s clandestine role as an
intelligence agent of the British government, supporting the view that a man with as peripatetic
a life as Laurence in the Americas, and a speaker of other languages, as we believe he was,
might well have been so engaged. Britain had many far-flung interests and even more enemies.
No evidence has presented itself to us for such a conclusion; nevertheless documents and other
proof might have been available to James and Sarah’s offspring who, in their adult lives, were
responsible for the dissemination of such claims for their father.
Research into Jewish business networks in the United States in the 19th century shows
extensive trade and capital movements between northern cities such as New York and southern
and rural centres and states such as Louisiana. ‘Close-knit networks such as these provided
individual businesses with access to the capital and goods of larger markets, and once this
access was established, these businesses could then extend their networks to share that access
with other Jewish firms. These relationships were mutually beneficial.’95
Certainly the Montefiore family of James’s mother had connections in the United States
and the Caribbean, as did the da Costas. Some of the businesses referred to in the document
from which the above is taken were Levy-named affairs. However 1850 was almost four
decades after James’s conversion to Christianity so it seems unlikely that he was relying on
Jewish connections at that time, though Levy and Montefiore family links may have been
important.
It is held by some family members that at least one of James’s brothers, John, lived in
the United States. Reference has been made to him as a ‘captain’; and also to the fact that his
family became farmers in Nebraska. We have now established that Franklin Laurence, a
grandson of Joseph, went to the USA in consequence of some ‘misdemeanor’ in 1885; soon
afterwards his father, Perceval (or Percival), purchased a farm for him in Nebraska, though
British consul in Cartagena, Mr Watts. The Caribbean coastal city of Cartagena was where
Jayme Lister went to convalesce under the care of Dr Da Costa in 1825 (see p 31). Samuel
Massett died of yellow fever in Cartagena in 1826.
94
JM Bennett, A History of Solicitors in NSW, Legal Books, 1984.
95
American Jewish Archives.

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Franklin seems to have remained feckless.96 It is also held that Laurence descendants
established a thriving hardware business in the Midwest; these may have been Franklin’s
offspring but are beyond the scope of this essay. It is the case that one of James and Sarah’s
sons, Edward, did later live in the United States, having returned from Australia. Civil war
records show Edward Zachary Laurence of New York City aged 24 enlisting as a captain on
27 July 1861. He served in various regiments finally being promoted to brevet major on 23
October 1865.
11. SIMHA LEVY/LAURENCE’S DEATH AND WILL
JAMES’S MOTHER, SIMHA HANNAH, by then known as Selina Hannah Laurence, died in 1838,
aged 71, and is buried in St Mary’s, Stoke Newington.97 Again there would have been a
substantial benefit to James as she left a significant estate. The interesting point to note about
the bequest left to James is that he specifically is to have his share discounted by the sum of
150 pounds sterling ‘which I have advanced to him and that the same shall be debited’. All her
children ‘who may be living at the time of my death’ are to receive a portion of the residue of
her estate, ‘to be divided equally between them’, with two provisos, the one for James as
mentioned and the other for her son Alexander, for whom, as we have seen in the case of the
will of her husband Zaccaria, special arrangements were to be made to manage the funds.
The residue of her estate is what remains after named people receive various sums.
These include two sons, Zaccaria Laurence and George Laurence, the designated executors of
the will, the sum of 10 pounds each; two sons-in-law, the Rev. Edward Barlee and John Hayes,
10 pounds each; her daughters-in-law, Penelope Laurence, Caroline Laurence and Euphemia
Laurence, the sum of 10 pounds each; her brothers 10 pounds each; her sister Hannah 50
pounds; her sister Lydia 19 pounds, 19 shillings; her other sisters, 10 pounds each; and her
sister-in–law, Anna Levy Rocha 10 pounds, and so on, including her granddaughters, the future
wives of her unmarried sons, her late servant and various charities are also beneficiaries. There
is a distribution of what seems like a prodigious amount of jewellery, including to her ‘nephew
Moses Montefiore Esquire of Park Lane a ring made from my hair and surround with Brilliants
which will be found among my Trinkets and I return him many thanks for what he promised
to do for me’ (to keep an eye on Alexander’s welfare, according to English sources); a similar
ring is bequeathed to brother-in-law Mr G. da Costa; while her Hebrew books go to her brother
Eliezer (father of Sydney’s Joseph Montefiore).98 Presumably the ‘Wines and Spirits that may
be in and around my dwelling house’, left to Simha by husband Zaccaria, had been put to good
96
Interestingly another of Joseph’s descendants, Henry Laurence, grandfather of Tim Laurence
(and his brother Jonathan), settled in South America, in British Guiana, and descendants remain
to this day in Colombia.
97
James’s brother, Zaccaria, in an addendum to the will dated 12 January 1839, attests that
‘Sarah’ was written mistakenly for ‘Selina’ on her will because of ‘a near similarity in the
pronunciation in the two names.’
98
Family lore in England has it that ‘Uncle Moses was very upset’ when Simha (or Selinah
as they referred to her) converted. (Letter from Hugh Montefiore, Bishop of Birmingham, to
Rev Christopher Laurence; incidental confirmation that some Montefiores have converted).

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use in the intervening years. The will refers to her collection of ‘Jacobite Art’ which Alexander
might ‘take benefit of’.99
Her usual residence was given as Bath, but she was by then residing at Bury Court, St Mary
Axe, in the City of London, a few minutes’ walk from the Bevis Marks Synagogue, the place
of her marriage as Simha de Haim Moses Montefiore to Zaccaria Levy in 1787. The ‘radical
assimilation’ referred to by Emma Klein in Lost Jews is given greater poignancy by the
consideration given to her Jewish family and relatives by Simha Hannah in her will. It is hard
to escape the conclusion that her conversion and name change (ironically from a name meaning
‘joy’) were reluctantly entered into at the behest of her family, particularly Joseph and a pair
of Penelopes, beginning with his wife’s grandmother (through her will).100
As descendants of James and Sarah we note that Sarah was not included amongst Simha’s
daughters-in-law. This indicates the possibility that James and Sarah were not married, or not
in any way that satisfied the family, or that his family might not yet know of Sarah (nor of
James Frederick who was born in 1836), or that they did not approve of James’s choice (see
page 53). In any event, James was treated differently from his siblings; he had been advanced
a reasonable sum (we have no idea how it was used, whether to further his business interests
in America or to repay debts) and it would be paid back to his mother’s estate by being
discounted from his share.101 We have observed that James habitually sailed with ‘passage free’
or a ticket bought by someone else, suggesting that he was a borrower, for whatever reason.
12. JOURNEY TO AUSTRALIA
IN 1853 JAMES AND SARAH AND THEIR SIX SURVIVING CHILDREN made their final transoceanic
voyage. The Sydney Morning Herald reported the arrival of Mr and Mrs J.L. Laurence and
children in Port Jackson aboard the Marchioness of Londonderry under Captain Williams on
16 August, having set out from Plymouth on 8 May. This journey would have been preceded
by a trans-Atlantic passage from America. James Frederick was 17 years old, Edward 16,
Matilda 11, Charles nine, and the youngest, George and Ellen were five and three respectively,
so these would have been challenging voyages and the one to Sydney the longest yet. Sea travel
remained dangerous, and sickness, atrocious food, discomfort and claustrophobia prevailed;
child mortality was high. Sarah was pregnant with their eighth child. They had endured the
tragedy of losing Louisa Massett as an infant some years earlier, and though such deaths were
99
It is probable that the will uses the term ‘Jacobite’ to refer to Jewish – in the sense of Jacob
being the patriarch of the Israelites – rather than to the rebellious movement in the British Isles
in the 17th century; and not to be confused with Jacobinism.
100
The possibility of Simha having a mental illness was raised in the trial of James Frederick
Laurence in 1879. During her life she had lost two infant children, had at least one, possibly
two, who suffered a degree of incapacitation, saw her large family convert to Christianity and
assume a name only remotely connected to one of her sons, and subsequently submitted to
conversion herself as well as radical alteration of her names; these and other unknown
stresses may have contributed to declining mental health. See Endnotes.
101
The purchasing power of £150 in 1830 in 2018: £16,645, based on the average inflation
rate of 2.54% per year. The value to James, of course, would depend upon how it was used.

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not uncommon in the 19th century, the Laurences would have been anxious for the health and
safety of their large family, and, one would expect, full of anticipation for what settlement in
the colony of New South Wales held for them.102
In 1861 the family’s address was given as 51 Bourke Street Darlinghurst, Sydney, and
James was employed as a clerk of the District Court. He was so employed from March 1859
until 1871 when he was promoted to first clerk of the District Court. From 1868 to 1869 they
lived at Beddington Cottage, Elizabeth Street Ashfield. Subsequently their address was given
as 338 Victoria St Darlinghurst, where James died on 31 December 1874, aged 76.103
James was 57 and Sarah 34 when they made their move to Australia with their young,
growing family. It is inconceivable that they did not have ample financial resources possibly
from savings and investments James had made during his years of wandering about the
Americas, undoubtedly with more purpose than it seems, and from family bequests. His father
Zaccaria had died in 1828 and as we have seen left a detailed will which gave James a tenth
share in the counting house. James may have continued as a shareholder in this business, or
sold his share and made adroit investments. James’s trip back to England would have been over
his father’s death, and execution of the will.
Why did the family make this momentous journey to a new continent? The colony of
NSW was 68 years old in 1853. By comparison with the United States it was tiny and isolated,
still a British penal outpost (though the immigration of free settlers was growing strongly) on
the edge of a huge, mostly unknown land, which would surely have presented fewer
opportunities, and would necessitate James leaving whatever occupation or business he had in
the Americas. But the US was on the brink of civil war; James, as we have seen, moved between
the south and the north, and was quite likely dependent on business networks in a number of
states, so perhaps he feared the US tearing itself apart and not recovering for decades. Perhaps
he did not like the idea of slavery, or perhaps he did not want to see the emancipation of slaves
in the south.104 Whatever the motivation, it must be that James and Sarah were confident that
NSW offered greater potential for their family than the United States at that time.
102
The shipping report for the arrival of the Marchioness of Londonderry records ‘Mr and
Mrs Laurence & 7 children’. Another document, listing the family and the ages of children at
embarkation in the port of London lists Mr Laurence followed by Mrs ‘ditto mark’ and then
six ditto marks for six children; their ages are given as 16, 15, 10, 8, 4 and 2. Given the
number of pen marks on the embarkation report it is entirely possible that this was
transcribed as ‘7’ on the arrival document. Two of the children had birthdays at sea, two did
not and for two we don’t know the month of their birth. This may explain the minor
discrepancies in the children’s ages (see text above). There is a slight chance that there was
another child about whom we know nothing: the Levy/Montefiore family tree shows an
unnamed branch after Ellen and before Annie, suggesting that James and Sarah may have had
an infant with them, one who died sometime after their arrival in Sydney. However this child
is not added to the number of deceased children noted in either James or Sarah’s death
notices. The shipping agent engaged is Montefiore Graham and Co.
103
It is probable that the two Darlinghurst addresses were places of work, and that the family
resided in Ashfield.
104
The fact that second son Edward returned to America a few years later to enlist as a
volunteer soldier in New York suggests that Laurence would not have been a supporter of the

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13. LIFE IN NEW SOUTH WALES
COLONIAL AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY was colourfully captured by contemporary visitors.105 For a

‘cosmopolitan’ (in the sense of well-travelled, sophisticated people, rather than its pejorative
usage for Jews – ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ was the preferred Soviet-era slur – though we may
wonder where James and Sarah’s roots were) such as James, and probably Sarah, Sydney must
have seemed insular and parochial, and disconcertingly remote. But they had lived in other
colonial societies and independent settler states such as the USA, and would have been aware
of their advantage in being British and adherents of the Church of England, and so part of the
colonial ascendancy.
New South Wales in the 1850s was a colony which had been claimed for the British
crown under a fraudulent terra nullius doctrine with brutal disregard for those who already
occupied the land, and settled by an often violent prison system; even when the Laurences
arrived, six decades after the first fleet, Cockatoo Island in the heart of Sydney would hold a
penitentiary for convicts designed to ‘send a thrill of horror through every honest member of
society’.106 Such a foundation must have had an enduring impact on the character of the place
and people. NSW was racist, aggressively and absurdly sectarian, punitive, totally unbalanced
in the ratio of males to females (in favour of the former) and riven by fevered disputes between
‘Emancipists’ and ‘Exclusives’.
‘Australian squatters and settlers were even more conservative than the English
squirearchy whose manners and customs they were learning to ape,’ according to Robert
Hughes. There were no George Washingtons or Simon Bolivars amongst the Emancipists or
the Australian born (the ‘Currency’) and seldom were heard calls such as those of Bolivar to
eradicate the tyranny of hereditary monarchs.
There were rebels amongst the convicts, particularly the Irish, and also amongst
fledgling unionists like the Tolpuddle Martyrs, but their rebellions were doomed by the violent
reprisals of the colonial authorities. Even the most skilled and outspoken of the Emancipists,
WC Wentworth, agitated tirelessly and articulately (in his early years) for the best of what
British civil life offered, rather than seeking to break free as an independent nation. Wealth had
been created and amassed rapidly for many by a combination of land grants and a type of
slavery in the form of assigned convicts, contributing to a profoundly conservative political
culture. Manning Clark in A History of Australia, writes:
The Bourgeoisie also wanted to shovel out the ‘fools and triflers’ in the Australian colonies and take
over management of the State from the landed gentry, the colonial bureaucrats and the Imperial
mission of the Confederate states – though Edward himself may have been in revolt from a
reactionary father, as James himself might once have been.
105
‘I must say … that the wonders performed in the way of riding, driving, fighting, walking,
working, drinking, love-making, and speech-making, which men and women in Australia
have told me of themselves, would have been worth recording in a separate volume, had they
been related by any but the hero and heroine themselves.’ Anthony Trollope, 1873.
106
About 160,000 men, women and children were shipped in bondage to Australia. ‘This was
the largest forced exile of citizens at the behest of a European government in pre-modern
history’. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore.

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parliament.107 The difficulty was that they had interests in London which condemned them to the role
of a colonial rather than a national bourgeoisie. Their declarations of sympathy with and attachment to
the mother country were just as fulsome as those of the gentry. They proposed to see ‘dear old England
out of her trouble’. When the Reverend Dr Lang raised his voice again in 1852 for Freedom and
Independence for the Golden Lands of Australia they rebuked him. For the colonial bourgeoisie was
bound by more than the ties of sentiment to the mother country. The British provided the capital for all
those enterprises – railway building, roads public buildings, schools, universities, churches – which
brought profit to the colonial bourgeois. Both the colonies and the mother country were contributing to
that spread of British commerce over the whole globe, that industrialization of the world which would
bring in its train to all the world that peace of the bourgeoisie which passed all understanding.
John Dunmore Lang was a Scottish Presbyterian minister who was outspoken on many aspects
of colonial life. Radical and republican, he was ‘on fire with the enthusiasm of the English
upheavals in 1848’. He spoke of the rights of man, whilst Wentworth, recast as an ageing
conservative, campaigned for the rights of property. The delightful term ‘bunyip aristocracy’
came from a speech in 1853 by journalist Daniel Deniehy wherein he ridicules the attempts by
Wentworth to establish a titled, hereditary aristocracy in NSW. ‘Here, we all know the common
water mole was transferred into the duck-billed platypus and in some distant emulation of this
degeneration, I suppose we are to be favoured with a bunyip aristocracy’, Deniehy mocked,
‘Even the poor Irishman in the streets of Dublin would fling his jibe at the Botany Bay
aristocrats.’ So ludicrous were they that, ‘They could not aspire to the miserable and effete
dignity of the grandees of Spain.’ The proposal was, fortunately, abandoned.
Such debates about the composition of the fledgling Legislative Council enlivened
public life at the time the Laurences arrived in the colony.
Meanwhile the frontier was moving inexorably outwards. Many epic journeys of
exploration, those of Thomas Mitchell, Edward John Eyre, Ludwig Leichhardt and others, had
been undertaken and vast areas of country, Mitchell’s sublime ‘Australia Felix’, opened up to
settlers for farming and grazing. As the frontier progressively devoured their lands, the first
Australians found themselves overwhelmed, their culture and health shattered, their very lives
destroyed in what are now accepted as violent frontier wars.108 As Clark puts it, ‘on all the
frontiers of settlement … settlers treated the aborigines not as children of nature, not the
instruments of white man’s profit, but as vermin which had to be destroyed.’
The colonial bourgeoisie believed it was possible to achieve material progress, promote
equality of opportunity and abolish the privileges of birth while remaining loyal British
subjects: in fact their very Britishness was what they believed conferred respectability. They
were, however, on their way to creating a vigorous democracy, fostered by a liberal press. It
was not by any imagination egalitarian – only men with a defined value in property were
permitted to vote – nor a racially inclusive one. It was a democracy for the white man,
107
The English ruling classes, according to the surprisingly fearless, pugnacious Australian
press, were responsible for the disasters on the fields of battle in the Crimean war, for
example the charge of the Light Brigade (October 1854). The Courier in Hobart Town
opined scathingly that, ‘The people and the bourgeoisie must both lend a hand to shovel out
of power the traitors, fools and triflers … the senile, drivelling aristocratic government.’
108
Historian Mark McKenna observes, ‘Australia was unique among British colonies in
being colonised without treaty. In stark contrast to other British colonies, the continent was
conquered without negotiation with its Indigenous people.’

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preferably those of ‘sturdy British stock’.109 Most egregiously, Indigenous Australians had no
place in this vision for a new, young Britain beneath the Southern Cross. There were few in
pre-federation years who understood or cared that the price paid for the development of this
Australia was the destruction of Aboriginal society. We have no sense of what James Laurence
would have made of this asymmetrical collision of force and culture.
The contrast with South America, or indeed, Louisiana, in terms of racial mixing is
dramatic. Following his momentous journeys of scientific exploration in the early 19th century,
Alexander von Humboldt estimated that Venezuela had a population of 800,000 of whom more
than half were mestizo or mulatto. Very early in colonial history ‘a cosmic race representative
of all continents began to emerge’, following the arrival of the already racially diverse
Spaniards, and intermarriage with Indians and blacks.110
So James and Sarah Laurence arrived in Sydney at the very moment of these vigorous
debates and we expect that they would have found themselves comfortable with the prejudices
of and opportunities provided for the colonial bourgeoisie. It would be surprising if the decision
to migrate from America with a growing family was made without consulting family members
already in the Australian colonies, and seeking their views on social, economic and political
developments. It is likely that the advent of the gold rush had some impact on their decision,
as well. There would be opportunities for Laurence in the money trade or as a merchant,
occupations with which he was well acquainted.
What did the Laurences bring to Australia? A family of ideal immigrants, quite
probably. A wealthy, Christian, British family with six young children, a breadwinner with
wide-ranging experience and possibly influential connections, and a youthful, energetic,
devoted wife.
Thomas Keneally has observed that, ‘By 1860 the idea of Australia as the place for the
less talented or more disreputable young Briton was well established in British culture. It would
continue to be so. Charles Dickens can be seen as typical of a number of nineteenth-century
bourgeois Englishmen who saw Australia as offering possible redemption for unsatisfactory
sons.’ While James spent several years in the unlikely guise of soldier of fortune, and possibly
ardent supporter of the revolution against Spain in South America, and may not have been
attentive to whatever role his father’s businesses held for him, it would be highly speculative
to conclude that he came to Australia as an ‘unsatisfactory son’ seeking redemption.
Robert Hughes, writing on the subject of ‘gentlemen of New South Wales’, observes:
One speaks of ‘colonial gentry’ as though there were gentlemen in early Australia; but there were not.
Frontiers have a way of killing, maiming or simply dismissing gentlemen. In any case most folk with
settled estates have no need to go to a raw, new country. They can invest in it later, without needing to
109
‘Nineteenth century democracy needs no more complete vindication for its existence than
the fact that it has kept for the white race the best portions of the world’s surface, temperate
America and Australia’, Theodore Roosevelt; with the explicit corollary being that the ‘black
and yellow races’ and the ‘hybrids’ of Latin America can remain in the torrid or other
inhospitable zones. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line.
110
Arana. She notes that in the late 16th century, the population of Venezuela ‘counted 5000
Spaniards, 10,000 Africans, and 350,000 native Indians’, the foundations of that ‘cosmic
race’.

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break their bodies on it now. To succeed on the frontier a man needed the kind of violent grabbing drive
that only failure or mediocrity in his former life could fuel.
The male society of early New South Wales could be roughly sorted into three kinds of people. There
were opportunists struggling to be gentlemen; convicts and outcasts waiting to be opportunists; and the
failures who would never become anything. Social life thus displayed a crude, insecure face which the
cosmetic application of airs and graces could not altogether hide. The mixture of ambition and social
pretention wearied many a visitor. The relentless deployment of tooth and claw against the tentative
mobility of the lower orders would impress Charles Darwin himself with its unpleasant naïveté when
he arrived in Sydney on the Beagle in 1836.
This is a savage demolition of the types of people presenting themselves as ‘gentlemen’ in half-
made, faraway, colonial societies. And whatever the station of new arrivals in their former
lives, there is no doubt that such societies, particularly one which was three months’ sailing
from the mother country, gave men and women a once in a lifetime opportunity to reinvent
themselves, acquire pasts that were not theirs, and portray themselves as they desired. However
those who had already positioned themselves to their advantage would ferociously fight off
such newcomers.
Hughes adds, ‘The Exclusives had come from nowhere in a generation or two. They
were determined to prevent other men, also from nowhere, from getting what they had. Hence
their stubborn resistance to the gathering social demands of the Emancipists and their
Australian-born children. It was a campaign fought with extreme punctilio.’
The establishment, such as it was in NSW, was dominated by the likes of John
Macarthur and his descendants, pastoralists who had been enriched by land grants and assigned
convict labour, and those who aspired to their company, people whose ideology was, in
Hughes’s words, ‘gut Tory conservatism, reinforced by the doctrines of the established Church
of England. Like the English squires they emulated they hated all things French and were apt
to treat any kind of Emancipist restiveness as unbridled Jacobinism’.111
The Exclusives regarded themselves as the only people capable of holding power in the
colony. The Emancipists and their children were ‘stained’ by convictry, which in their high-
handed view was ineradicable and hereditary. Hughes comments bitingly that ‘stock-breeding
encourages a rigid view of genetic inheritance’ and so the growing numbers of traders and
entrepreneurs, not being large land holders, were also thought unsuited to exercising power.
The Exclusives, however, did seek to marry their offspring into wealthy merchant families,
‘crossing their lines as they had crossed their sheep for economic hardihood’.112 The so called
‘new chum’ settlers, too, who were coming in fast-growing numbers after 1820 could also not
be relied upon. ‘Not being able to idealize their origins, the early Exclusives fetishized their
achievements fiercely and rigidly, seeing themselves as an island of order in a lake of arrivisme
and crime. They knew what was good for them was good for the country. They felt threatened
by the rise of new money, generated by trade and property deals. Less realistically, they tried
to cripple the Emancipists politically.’
So into a society that had developed along these lines, new chums James Laurence and
family disembarked from another world, some years after the height of the Exclusives’
111
French revolutionary movement.
112
Whether this livestock management technique resulted in the Exclusives seeking to marry
their offspring to Laurence or Montefiore offspring is beyond the scope of this essay.

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ascendancy, towards the very end of the transportation system that had created and built the
penal colony and the wealth of the establishment, just prior to New South Wales being granted
a form of self-government, and in the early years of the gold rush which would disrupt the
conservatives’ grip on power. The disruption however was limited in extent; the reformers in
the colony agitated passionately to get rid of convict transportation, staining as it allegedly did
the reputation of their new country, but ‘undying, wholehearted and groveling fealty to the
British Crown’, as Manning Clark has it, inevitably accompanied their submissions. Moreover,
the arrival of many thousands of Chinese gold seekers provided new opportunities for the
racialist assumptions of all classes in the colony to be loudly proclaimed.
And, beyond the Laurence’s acceptance, or otherwise, of the prevailing colonial culture
and political rivalries, what of their response to the land in which they found themselves? The
writer Marcus Clark delighted in describing the familiar European settlers’ view that nature,
here at the furthermost end of the world, was outlandish and baffling. Clark wrote that in
Australia was to be found the ‘Grotesque, the weird – the strange scribblings of Nature learning
how to write’. ‘For him it was a “fantastic land of monstrosities”, of trees without shade,
flowers without perfume, birds which could not fly and beasts which had not yet learnt to walk
on all fours. In the Australian bush a man learnt that there was “beauty in loneliness”, in the
barren and the uncouth. He learned to see beauty in “haggard gum trees blown into odd shapes”
or “distorted with fierce hot winds”.’ 113 We imagine that the Laurence family, too, might have
found this natural world exotic, if not ‘grotesque’, in their early years. After all, the bush, with
its peculiarities and solitude, was never far away in the 19th century.
Laurence’s employment, that of clerk of the court, is unexpected; we might have
supposed him to be involved in business or finance, given his background, his cousins the
Montefiores, and the opportunities deriving from gold fever or the need for investment. But he
was an old immigrant, and perhaps his job was to fill in time, his wealth being substantial.
Meanwhile his children were becoming educated and setting themselves up. St John’s Church
of England established a denominational day school in Ashfield in 1850. This may be where
Charles, George, Ellen and Annie attended school. Charles and George later became lawyers,
perhaps having taken an interest through their father’s role at the courts. They founded the first
of a succession of Laurence-named legal firms and partnerships.
Into Sydney in 1857 sailed Jeems Pipes of Pipesville, Stephen Massett. The day after
his arrival, he received a visit from his ‘old friend Col Laurence’, and while in residence in Pitt
St, ‘with the help of ‘Ed, son of Col L, had taken the Mechanics’ School of Arts for my opening
night’.114 Ed of course was Edward Zaccaria. So it seems Laurence had maintained contact
with this eccentric and humorous musician for many years. But when Massett departed for
Hobart Town, ‘bidding adieu to my esteemed friends, the L’s’ it was possibly the last time they
met. We might infer from the Jeems character, as depicted in his memoir, that James Laurence
was himself a broad-minded man with a sense of humour. Massett once referred to Laurence
as ‘facetious’, but given that he reveals himself as an eccentric, extroverted, well-educated
(reciting Shakespeare and Alexander Pope and singing opera), and witty individual, only
someone with a good sense of humour would have tolerated such a man as a friend.
113
Manning Clark.
114
Still located at 280 Pitt St, Sydney.

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Robert Hughes, following his scintillating study of the convict origins of Australia,
observes that despite bigots over generations ‘deriding Australians as the children of criminals
… whatever other conclusions can be drawn from our weird national origins, the post-colonial
history of Australia utterly exploded the theory of genetic criminal inheritance. Here was a
community handpicked over decades for their “criminal propensities” and for no other reason,
whose offspring turned out to form one of the most law-abiding societies in the world.’
Unfortunately, in a cruel twist of fate, criminality emerged in the otherwise law-
abiding Laurence family in July 1879 when James Frederick, then 43, murdered his boss. As
a newspaper report of the day has it:
All Melbourne was horrified yesterday (July 28) by the intelligence which was circulated at about
midday that Mr. Thomas Finlayson, Secretary of the Melbourne and Hobson’s Bay Railway Company,
had been shot dead on the platform of the central station by one of the minor officials. The statement
was at first disbelieved, but unhappily it was too true. The perpetrator of the atrocious deed was a man
named James Frederick Laurence, who for many years has been employed in the clerical branch of the
goods department at the Flinders Street Station. Amongst the employees of the Company Mr. Finlayson
has always been looked up to and respected, and his leniency rather than his severity has been remarked
by them almost without exception. Laurence, however, for some short time past appears to have been
labouring under some imaginary grievance, and there is reason to believe that his deadly intentions were
not directed against Mr. Finlayson alone. Indeed, circumstances would seem to indicate that while in
murdering Mr. Finlayson he was carrying out a long-previously conceived design, he particularly
wished to destroy Mr. Wakefield, the Accountant, at the same time. The reasons which actuated him in
arriving at his horrible resolve are somewhat obscure, but the result of careful enquiry goes to show that
his own misdeeds were the only cause which led to the unpleasant circumstances he mentally
resented.115
The reports were detailed and sensational. The circumstances, in an oyster bar at the station
where Laurence, ‘under the influence of intoxicating liquor’, calmly consumed a dozen oysters
and an oyster stew, before shooting Finlayson, in full view of witnesses, add to the bizarre
picture. Reporting on the inquest and the medical examination of Laurence, which included a
forensic probing of his psychiatric health, and that of his forebears, was also lurid, while at the
same time raising intriguing questions about the mental stability of the family.
Laurence was charged with murder, convicted and sentenced to death; this was
commuted to life imprisonment by the governor exercising his prerogative of mercy on 10
October 1879, and he served until 4 June 1898 in Pentridge, Melbourne. The police document
issued upon his release describes ‘Lawrence’ as a native of Mexico, 5 foot 6 inches, fresh
complexion, blue eyes and grey hair; he had a number of tattoos, including the initials ET, his
wife Emily Tester, VJRES which we cannot place, a tomb, the American coat of arms, bracelet,
heart and dart on each wrist, and wreath and scroll beside the initials.
The conviction and gaoling of James Frederick must have been extraordinarily difficult
for Emily and their seven children, aged between 21 and seven, with four under 12. After his
release he returned to Sydney and lived in Manly with Emily, in a cottage in The Crescent, part
of the Delwood House estate owned by his younger brother Charles. In 1905 James Frederick
and Emily celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, and despite his manifest abuse of alcohol
and tobacco, mental disorder and suicide attempts, as attested in court, and his long
115
The Adelaide Register, 1 August 1879. Transcribed by Leigh Etherden.

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incarceration, he lived to 89 years of age, longer than his parents who died at 71 (Sarah) and
78 (James), and most of his siblings. George also lived to 89, Charles to 80, and Annie to 83.
Sarah Laurence died whilst her son was in prison; James senior had died a few years
earlier. For Sarah, this crime committed by her firstborn, the child she gave birth to at 16 years
of age in Mexico, and his subsequent imprisonment, must have been a terrible blow, bringing
shame and utter despair, and it explains why James Frederick was not named in her death
certificate, nor in her will; though in the subsequent indenture he appears.116
14. JAMES LAURENCE’S DEATH
JAMES DIED ON 31 DECEMBER 1874 at his ‘residence’ at 338 Victoria St Darlinghurst Sydney
(see page 41). He is buried in the cemetery at the St John’s Anglican Church, Alt Street,
Ashfield; he is named Col. James Lister Laurence on the headstone. No obituary or will has
been located. His death certificate lists him as ‘chief clerk’ district court, his father’s name as
being simply ‘Laurence’ and his mother’s as Sarah Montefiore; his cause of death is ‘English
cholera’, George M. Laurence is noted as the informant, also of Victoria Street Darlinghurst.
James is recorded as being born in Walthamstow, Essex,117 and resident in NSW 21 years; his
place of marriage to Sarah Green, Tampico, Republic of Mexico, is noted and the fact that they
have four male and three female children living, and one female deceased. George Laurence
seems surprisingly careless with information about his grandparents. James’s father was
Zaccaria Levy not ‘Laurence’, and his mother was Simha Hannah Montefiore, or at her death,
Selina Hannah Laurence.
The headstone in Ashfield also names Sarah Henrietta (see below), Alma Maria (first
wife of George Massett Laurence who died at only 30) and George Massett himself, raising
the possibility that it was the subsequent generation, the children of George and Alma, perhaps,
who had this headstone erected, and who perpetuated the ‘colonel’ legend. This view is
supported by obituaries for at least two of the Laurence sons. Charles Albert Laurence (who
died in 1925), founder of the law firm Laurence and Laurence, is described as follows: ‘The
son of a retired colonel of the British army, Mr. Laurence came to Australia with his parents in
1853’. George died in June 1937, and a notice in the Sydney Morning Herald of 9 June 1937
reads, ‘A son of Colonel James Laurence, he arrived in Sydney with his parents in 1863’ (sic).
And a note celebrating the golden wedding anniversary of James Frederick and Emily Caroline
Tester on 11 September 1905 at Scots Church, Church Hill (the first Presbyterian church in
Sydney, presided over by John Dunmore Lang until his death in 1876) refers to James as ‘the
eldest son of the late Colonel James Lister Laurence’. James Frederick’s death certificate of
July 1925 records his father as being an ‘army officer’. My own father, Graham Lister
Laurence, in an entry on his father Raymond in a book on the town of Ganmain, writes of ‘his
grandfather, Colonel James Lister Laurence’.
116
A note on Joseph’s family’s hand-drawn family tree reads ‘P’s diary entry for Sept 28,
1879 “heard that James Laurence shot his employer”,’ indicating that the families were in
contact across the world. P is Perce(i)val Laurence, Joseph’s third son and a cousin of James
Frederick.
117
We have now confirmed that his place of birth was Stamford Hill.

Murray Laurence
15. SARAH LAURENCE’S DEATH
SARAH DIED ON 25 MARCH 1891 of ‘cerebral apoplexy’, at the age of 71 years and six months.
Her father is named on the death certificate as ‘Green’ of unknown occupation, and her
mother’s names are ‘unknown’; the informant is again George M Laurence, by now living in
his mansion ‘Ulverston’ (named for a street in Walthamstow where his grandparents had lived),
in Liverpool Road, Summer Hill. Her children are listed as Matilda aged 49, Charles 46, George
42, Annie 37, and ‘1 boy and 2 girls dead’ – so one male and one female had died in the 16
years since James’s death, without doubt a source of great sorrow to Sarah, who, we assume,
had lived very far from her own parents and family. Her deceased children are Louisa Massett
who died in 1841, Edward who died in New York in 1890, having been in the United States
since the start of the civil war, and Ellen Sinclair who died in Petersham, Sydney in 1887. Her
first son, James Frederick, was then still alive, but he is not identified on the death certificate,
for reasons suggested above. The certificate notes her living in the colony ‘about 38 years’.
Sarah’s will is dated 27 September 1890. There is an indenture to the will dated 8
September 1902 between James Frederick Laurence, estate agent, Charles Albert Laurence,
solicitor, George Turner, ex-bank clerk (husband of Matilda Eliza), William Gordon Hayes-
Williams, solicitor and Annie Glover Hayes-Williams, wife, (collectively designated
‘Releasors’), and George Masset Laurence, solicitor; this document refers to the original will
which appointed George sole trustee and executor, and bequeathed to him all her ‘real and
personal property whatsoever and whersoever and to sell and divide the same amongst such of
the children then living … as the said GML might in his absolute discretion think fit’. The
property included a house at Manly which in September 1894 was valued and bought by
George Massett from his mother’s estate for £750. Subsequently, after the payment of any
debts, the remaining sum was distributed equally. The effect of the indenture is to indemnify
George Masset from any claim, past, present or future relating to Sarah’s estate.
James and Sarah’s marriage of 39 years at his death with another 16 of Sarah’s
widowhood can be seen as a truly human story of love and commitment, bravery and tragedy,
tempest and silence; one that involved unforeseen dislocations and challenges, strange places,
climates and people, and isolation. Of course there were established and busy transportation
routes and postal services, and the expectations of people for contact across the globe can only
be consistent with the technologies of the day.
Nevertheless we can imagine longing eyes turned occasionally towards the harbour
and the never-ending ocean beyond.

Murray Laurence
EPILOGUE: AN UNCHARTED VOYAGE, A TURBULENT CENTURY

You must always have Ithaka in your mind
Arrival there is your predestination.
But do not hurry the journey at all,
Better that it should last many years;
Be quite old when you anchor at the island,
Rich with all you have gained on the way,
Not expecting Ithaka to give you riches.118
JAMES LAURENCE WAS A MAN OF MIGRATIONS AND UPHEAVALS, name changes and
reinventions. But he was also a man who was born and lived in an era of great global
turbulence. At the time of his birth the population of the entire world was just under one billion.
North and South America and Australia were very sparsely peopled, with non-indigenous
populations of about five million and five thousand respectively.119 Throughout the Americas
and across great tracts of Europe, Siberia, Central and Western Asia and Africa, humans were
still in proportion to the bountiful lands they lived in. They roamed through immense forests,
settled along unending seacoasts and on vast riverine flood plains; they were scattered in
microscopic numbers through far-flung archipelagos, infinite deserts and the impenetrable
fastness of mountain ranges, indifferent to the struggles gripping a handful of metropolitan
capitals. Seas, lands, waterways and the skies were pristine and afforded people an incredible
bounty for their sustenance. And much of the world was still virtually unknown. It could be
safely claimed that ‘even the best-educated and best-informed men then living – let us say a
man like the scientist and traveller Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) – knew only patches
of the inhabited globe’.120
Even then, the most fertile of the great river valleys and flood plains were subject to
population pressures. The explorations and invasions of the colonial powers were accelerating
the dispossession, enslavement and destruction of indigenous peoples, while cities such as
London and Paris, though much smaller than today, with populations of a million and half a
million respectively, were oppressive, squalid and disease and crime plagued, offering a
miserable existence to all but the prosperous few. The London of the Montefiores and Levys
was, in terms of spaciousness, comfort and safety, far from that of the many thousands who
during the first half of James Laurence’s life were condemned to be shipped as human flotsam
to penal colonies in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land.
Most of the world’s inhabitants, however, in the last decades of the 18th century, lived
and died in the country, even the district, of their birth. And they were overwhelmingly rural.
For them the world was vast and unfathomable, and so to be plucked from such
incomprehension to serve as press-ganged seamen or soldiers in the terrifying wars of the
autocratic ruling classes, or sentenced to transportation in irons to what might have been
another planet, must have been profoundly shocking.
118
Excerpt from CP Cavafy, Ithaka, trans. John Mavrogordato. Complete poem in Endnotes.
119
The indigenous population of Australia was estimated to be about 750,000 in 1788.
120
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848.

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Some of the great global upheavals and social and political developments which
occurred during the lives of James (1796 to 1874) and Sarah (1819 to 1891) are, in loose
chronological order: revolution in France, the Napoleonic wars in Europe from 1789 to 1815
and the creation of the largest empire Europe had seen since the days of Charlemagne; the
lasting impact of the Enlightenment over the ‘long 18th century’ from 1685 to 1815 and the
publication of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man in 1791 and An Essay on the Principle of
Population by Thomas Malthus in 1798; the establishment of British penal colonies in
Australia in 1788 and after; revolutions in Haiti and Latin America from the 1790s to 1826;
the industrial revolution, and the first railways and steamships in the first decades of the 19 th
century; the opium wars of 1839 to 1842 which opened the last remaining non-European
power, China, to western military and economic aggression; anti-monarchy, pro-democracy
revolutions across Europe in 1848; the exploration and mapping of continents; the
dispossession of indigenous peoples; the progressive abolition of slavery between 1800 and
1865; relentless expansion of the USA westwards; the mid-century gold rushes in North
America and Australia; the expansion of the British empire and achievement of absolute British
global supremacy; the Irish famine from 1845 to 1849 and unprecedented movement of peoples
from Europe to the New World; the American civil war from 1861 to 1865; Charles Darwin
and the voyage of the Beagle in 1831, and publication of On The Origins of Species in 1859;
the publication of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto in 1848, and
Marx, Das Kapital in 1867. Concurrently there were great advances in public health, the
gradual abolition of child labour in parts of the world, advances in democratic and worker
rights and accelerating scientific and technological progress.121
These and other momentous events and developments, however distant, can be said to
have had an impact on the lives of our forebears because of their reverberations through
societies in which they lived, on their fortunes and opportunities, and on familial relationships,
and because their lives were lived on a global stage. Their very ‘rootlessness’ expanded their
horizons.
But within themselves there must also have occurred existential upheavals. Jacob Levy
converted to Christianity when he was 16 years old. This was not a matter of life or death as it
was for Jews in many parts of Europe and earlier in the Iberian Peninsula. Nor was it a
‘conversion of convenience’ – as indeed conversions were for many Sephardim in Spain, who
lived as Christians but were ready to reconvert when they reached havens like Venice,
Amsterdam or parts of the New World. James’s father did not convert; his mother Simha did
so, presumably after the death of Zaccaria, and probably having been pestered by her own
offspring.
121
Anglo-Saxon triumphalism took hold during this period: ‘The kind of colonising conquest,
whereby the people of the United States have extended their borders, has much in common
with similar movements in Canada and Australia, all of them standing in sharp contrast to
what has gone on in Spanish-American lands’, Theodore Roosevelt. The countervailing view,
from the Cuban writer and revolutionary, Jose Marti: Anglo-Saxons had ‘consumed the
native race, fomented and lived off the slavery of another race and reduced or robbed the
neighbouring countries’ and believed in the ‘invincible superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race
over the Latin’. Lake and Reynolds.

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James then travelled to the Americas to take part in anti-colonial insurgency and wars
as a soldier of fortune. Clearly he was not travelling down a path preordained for young men
of his class in England. But his father had migrated, most probably from Venice, while his
mother’s family were great movers and had influential branches across the western hemisphere,
and, as we have seen, in Australia. Emma Klein in Lost Jews implies a sense of abandonment
and desolation for our great (three times) grandparents resulting from the radical assimilation
of their whole family, with Simha being buried alone in a Christian cemetery while Zaccaria
lies forsaken beside the empty plot reserved for her in the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish cemetery.
In our survey of the life of one of their children, James, we find no other reference to
an emotional response. Yet there almost certainly would have been. It is difficult to conceive
that none of the nine children would have engaged in serious soul searching, reflection and
argument, if not suffering emotional turmoil. From today’s perspective it is almost impossible
to imagine how James and his siblings all consented to convert to Christianity, and, equally,
how the males agreed to take on a new and, for them, obscure surname, as if in fraternal
solidarity with the demands placed on Zaccaria and Simha’s fourth child, Joseph.
And if their parents reluctantly accepted that conversion and absorption into bourgeois
English society was inevitable, even desirable, in ‘those anti-Semitic times’, Joseph’s wife and
her family must have been powerful persuaders, and without compassion. Simha’s own family,
the Montefiores, provided striking evidence that conversion and total absorption were not
always required. Alas, we have no letters or other documents that might answer such questions,
though in the trial of James Frederick much attention was given to his grandmother Simha’s
mental illness, perhaps brought on by that feeling of abandonment and desolation.
Equally, we have no personal reflections from James of the faraway places he passed
through or settled in, on his response to his surroundings, and to the people, cultures and
languages he found himself amongst, and the tumultuous politics all around him. His journal
from South America and the Caribbean is invaluable, but, as has been said, it provides little
beyond fairly straightforward and unsentimental facts: where I went, what strange or terrible
things happened to me, what certain others, often fools or knaves, did or did not do, where I
went next. There is nothing given on what friendships he may have developed in circumstances
when men often forge intense bonds of comradeship. There is no opinion given on the
extraordinary epochal revolution in which he played a part, however minor, nor on the
revolution’s charismatic leaders, with some of whom, Bolivar, Brion and Montilla, he appears
to have had business.
For James and Sarah as a couple we have nothing that will help us understand why they
married (if, indeed, they did at that time), why in Mexico, why their family life between 1835
and 1853 was seemingly so peripatetic, and how each responded to this. We can only surmise
that it was James’s occupation which took them and their growing family, and James alone
sometimes, on these journeys and to settlement in cities from Tampico to New York.
Sarah Green, born in England according to her death notice, spent her life from age 15
in foreign countries, mostly antebellum America and Australia. We have no information about
her family that would allow us speculate on what such profound separation might have meant.
Of course such movement and disconnection is not uncommon, and was not uncommon in the
19th century. But from today’s perspective, when global movement and communication is

Murray Laurence
almost effortless, it is difficult to imagine the ways in which individuals and families overcame
psychological distance and distress.
There is mystery around Sarah’s origins. It is astonishing that her son George recorded
her mother’s names as unknown and her father as having no first name and unknown
occupation. Is it conceivable that a son could know so little about his mother; or were her
origins concealed either by James and Sarah themselves, or by George? Was George, a
solicitor, slapdash, repeating the carelessness he demonstrated with his grandparents’ names
following the death of James, although concealment was possible there, too. Possibly Sarah
was not English, but from Latin America; perhaps she and James had eloped – she was, after
all, not yet 16 when they married – and she thereby became estranged from her parents and
from any siblings or close relatives from a very young age. And there is Joseph’s family in
England knowing her by different middle names. The Laurences were, as we have seen, ready
and willing to ‘conform to the expectations of the Anglican ruling classes’ in order to secure
their upper-middle class standing; on the evidence we have, James’s siblings made marriages
that served this ambition. James’s choice of partner may not have done so, and if that were the
case, we might applaud this expression of independence.
The discovery of letters and portraits, or memoirs penned by family members, would
be of inestimable value. Instead we have stories of great aunts in fits of tidying-up throwing
away shoe boxes that have annoyed them for a generation, of papers heedlessly lost during
moves, or following marriages and deaths, and of individuals clutching and not sharing
documents which may be significant, leaving us, the descendants living in an utterly altered
world, with speculation, family lore and wishful thinking.122
Nonetheless, on one view, we do have substantial material of value, and from the
perspective of the 21st century we are able to arrive at a passable understanding through
contemplation and study, and reflection on our inherited ‘divided ghosts’. Such is the
possibility of our age – our references in this wired world are global as well as local, our
imaginations likely to be sparked by anything from anywhere or any era. We are in our
connected yet detached ways free to declare ourselves ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, and in so doing
overturn an ugly slur.
We understand that James’s parents, Zaccaria Levy and Simha Montefiore, from whom
those of us born in the early post-war years are separated by only four men and four women,
were themselves descended from tireless wanderers, people who ‘wandered far away all over
the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere’, as Leopold Bloom
morosely reflects, a state made necessary by the flight of Jews into exile repeatedly throughout
history. They could not choose to remain rooted in one place under one sky, living ‘among
their ancestors whose spirits are in their houses their churches, their burial grounds, their
122
The originals of the documents signed by Bolivar are said to exist but have not been made
available to us. The copies are severely water damaged and difficult to read. Nevertheless
when I showed them to two South Americans, one from Venezuela, the other from Argentina,
seeking help with translation, the responses were ones of astonishment and delight:
astonishment that they would ever know a foreigner remotely connected to the liberation of
their continent, and delight that the story of its liberation was known in Australia.

Murray Laurence
villages, and the fields they till.’ The very surname Montefiore attests to this far-ranging life
as émigrés over generations.
The question of ‘those who remain and those who depart’ and that of the ‘divided ghost’
is transformed when the question is about such people. The Levys and Montefiores were not
‘people who had never contemplated leaving the environment from which they had sprung’.
The divided ghost of the diasporic Jew is more a radically dispersed ghost, wandering in exile.
Such dispersion has, however, been accompanied by extraordinary internal cohesion. As the
writer Alberto Manguel, in his commentary on the legend of the ‘Wandering Jew’ in literature,
puts it: ‘Long after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, Jews in scattered lands
continued to carry out the appointed rituals, moving about in a space that no longer existed in
stone and mortar, but only in the words set down for their guidance. That is the nature of all
exile: it affirms the perseverance of memory.’123
For James the ‘appointed rituals’ were put aside when he abandoned Judaism and
converted, but cultural legacy and memory endures, linking generations despite cultural and
socio-economic change, and fortifying against social and personal fragmentation. Meir
Gover’s warning ‘he who forgets his past has no future’ (see page 17) sounds somewhat
apocalyptic, but it contains an essential truth. There is no future, however, in being captured
by archaic ancestral or cultural imperatives.
James seems to have assimilated an impulse to move forward, ‘towards the distant
horizon, curious to find out what awaits beyond’,124 rather than to settle somewhere and claim
it as home, though the impulse must have ebbed by the time he landed in Sydney at age 57 with
responsibility for seven other humans and another on the way. And, no doubt, by now Sarah
would be hoping for a more permanent home. She was clearly a brave, resilient individual, and
at age 34 she is sure to have become more assertive.
The future, after all, belonged to her and her young children.
ENDNOTES
The children of James and Sarah Laurence, and their marriages and children:
James Frederick, born 2 June 1836, Tampico, Mexico, died 3 July 1925, Sydney; clerk, estate
and insurance agent. Married Emily Caroline Tester, Sydney. Children: Annie Clara, Matilda
Louisa, Frederick Lister, Joseph, Charles Christopher, George Percival and Emily Giles.
Edward Zaccaria, born 2 October 1837, New York, died 13 January 1882, New York;
unmarried. Brevet major in New York 61st Infantry Regiment 1861-1865.
Louisa Massett, born 19 October 1839, New York, died 11 August 1841, New York.
Matilda Eliza, born 7 April 1842, New York, died 11 June 1897, Sydney. Married George
Turner, bank clerk, in Brisbane, returned to Sydney soon after their marriage. Children:
123
Alberto Manguel, ‘The Exile’s Library’, The Guardian 21 February 2009.
124
Manguel.

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Henrietta Louisa, Ellen D., George G., Charles J., Mary Edith, Edward Percival, Annie J.,
Lillian St Clair and Julia Amy.
Charles Albert, born 1844, Caracas, Venezuela, died 21 August 1925, Wahroonga. Married
Ellen Julia Underwood. Children: Violet Effie, Alice Maud, Ernest Albert, Muriel, Charles
Sydney, Ethel, Cecil Albert, Neville Charles and Roy Charles.
George Massett, born 10 June 1848, New York, died 6 June 1937, Mosman. Married (1) Alma
Maria Jones and (2) Fanny Kent. George and Alma’s children: Elsie Durston, Stanley Tillotson,
Gertrude Alice, Stella Mary, Raymond Lister, Norman George and Dorothy Alma. George and
Fanny had one child, Marcia Massett; Fanny already had two daughters by her deceased
husband: Maud Olga Margaret and Marie Ruth Kent.
Ellen Sinclair, born 1850, New Orleans, died 25 January 1887, Sydney. Married (1) William
Selwyn King and (2) Arthur Findlay Laurence (her cousin, a grandson of Benjamin
Levy/Laurence). Ellen’s headstone is in the cemetery of St John’s Church, Ashfield. Ellen and
William’s children: Annie Rose, Evelyn May, George Lister, William Selwyn. Ellen and
Arthur’s children: Arthur Leslie, Florence Kathleen, Constance L., Ellen Sinclair and Amy
Rose.
Annie Glover, born 14 February 1854 Sydney, died 21 June 1937 Sydney. Married William
Gordon Hayes-Williams who became NSW Registrar-General in 1898. They lived in
Wollstonecraft. Children: Clive and Laurence Gordon.
The Welcome Wall, Sydney

The arrival of the Laurence family in Sydney on 16 August 1853 is commemorated in an entry
on the Welcome Wall at the Maritime Museum, Darling Harbour, Sydney.
The trial and sentencing of James Frederick Laurence

The newspaper reports of the murder and subsequent trial in Melbourne provide new insights
into the Laurence family. James Frederick, who was 17 when the family landed in Sydney in
1853 must have left for Melbourne within a decade, as by 1862 he was working as a delivery
clerk for a firm servicing the railway. His departure from Sydney and the family and the
relatively menial nature of his employment raise questions about his personal adjustment and
whether psychological issues may have been a factor.
The reports of the ‘assassination’ itself focused on the evidence of premeditation,
though Laurence argued that he had bought the pistol as protection because he had been ‘stuck-
up by larrikins’:
That the murder was premeditated is established by the fact that the revolver with which it was
committed was purchased by Laurence as long ago as July 18. The weapon, which is a No. 2 Webley
revolver, carrying a No. 320 central fire cartridge, was procured from Mr. Rosier of Elizabeth Street.
The murderer selected it himself, and was furnished with an invoice for the amount, £3 10s, which he
promised to pay. He also obtained a supply of cartridges to fit the pistol. Having so armed himself it is
surmised that he carried the loaded weapon about with him, awaiting a favourable opportunity for
carrying out his murderous project.
Also of interest was the astounding fact that the wrong man may have been murdered:

Murray Laurence
By that time a dense crowd had assembled, and some delay was experienced in the removal of the
prisoner to the watchhouse. On his appearance, guarded by several constables, cries of “Lynch him”
became general, and it was with difficulty that the spectators could be restrained from offering him
personal violence. On reaching the watchhouse he was formally charged with wilful murder. While
being searched - an operation to which he submitted quietly - he suddenly stepped forward, and pointing
to Mr. Wakefield, who was standing near him, exclaimed in excited tones, ‘That’s the man, that’s the
man I wanted’.125
Earlier he had asked if it was Finlayson he had shot. When told it was he said, ‘I hope he is
not hurt. I had no enmity against him.’
The Morning Bulletin of Rockhampton reported that:
The prisoner Laurence stated at the watchhouse that he was an Englishman and a Roman Catholic, and
gave his age at 43 years.126 He is a man who, apart from traces of intemperance in his face, bears a
respectable appearance. He frequently drank so heavily as to render himself unfit for work, and on
several occasions his conduct had to be reported to the directors, but Mr Finlayson, knowing that he
had a wife and seven young children depending on his salary, always interceded and managed to save
him from severe punishments or dismissal.
The most revealing information comes during the summing up by Mr Purves, for the defence,
as reported by the Argus. Much time had been taken up with assessments of the accused’s
mental health as well as his addiction to alcohol and tobacco. Mr Purves sought to prove that
‘every fact in the evidence pointed to the murder being rather the act of a madman than a sane
man’. Laurence’s daughter, Annie, had claimed in evidence, ‘I have noticed something peculiar
about my father for the last 12 months. I have thought that he was crazy.’ His erratic behaviour
included a suicide attempt, as well as smashing crockery and furniture, throwing food into the
fire, suspecting that it had been poisoned, and complaining about the state of his eyes and head.
The most astonishing claim by the defence is that evidence presented by ‘the prisoner’s
mother had clearly shown that the prisoner was one of an insane family.’ Sarah Laurence
revealed to the court that (her husband) James’s mother was ‘out of her mind. She was in an
asylum for over a year. I knew one of her daughters who was confined in a lunatic asylum, was
out of her mind for many years.’ This was Justina, mother of three adult children in Western
Australia (see page 9). ‘Her (Justina’s) daughter was also out of her mind, but was not
dangerous. One brother of my husband’s was in an asylum for 20 years, some others of my
husband’s family are peculiar. My husband was strange occasionally in his manner.’
‘Were not these grounds enough to show that this man was probably affected with the
taint and at times insane?’ demanded Mr Purves. In his summing-up for the jury, Purves stated
that ‘the prisoner never attempted to shoot Mr Finlayson, but that Mr Finlayson was killed by
a lunatic when that lunatic was endeavouring to take his own life’.
The jury returned with a verdict of guilty, with a recommendation for mercy ‘on
account of the irritation of mind he was in at the time’.
The judge, who in his summing up had given the clear impression of leading the jury
towards a guilty verdict, declared that he would convey the jury’s verdict and recommendation
125
The Adelaide Register, 1 August 1879.
126
James’s claim that he was a Roman Catholic indicates possible alienation from his family,
although the affecting ‘revelations’ by his mother and others suggest otherwise.

Murray Laurence
to the governor and Executive Council for their decision. Addressing Laurence he observed, ‘I
feel much touched by the revelations made respecting your family. It is rare to see in a trial …
relations so intimate and dear brought into the witness box as those in your case who endeavour
by a faithful and truthful account of your life to exculpate you from the consequences of your
crime.’
‘Sentence of death was then passed in the usual form’, noted the Argus,
imperturbably.127
The governor of Victoria, George Augustus Phipps, initially upheld the sentence.
However, following petitions from doctors, and a deputation representing a large number of
members of the Legislative Assembly, the executive decided to commute the sentence to life
imprisonment. Telling factors were that the leading medical witness for the prosecution had
changed his stance since the trial, evidence from ‘the highest English authorities that the jury
had been misdirected when told to bring in a verdict of wilful murder if they believed that
Laurence knew what he was doing when he shot Mr Finlayson’, and further research
undertaken by members of the deputation who interviewed the prisoner and members of his
family ‘regarding the habits of his ancestors and his immediate relatives, from which we gather
the painful fact that Laurence has had the germs of mental disease transmitted to him from his
paternal grandmother, whilst his father was subject to epileptic attacks before the convict was
born. Several of his relatives have been insane, and some of them are now in lunatic asylums.
The convict whilst a lad was very peculiar in his manner and since his marriage has on several
occasions attempted to destroy himself.’
Laurence was in a condemned prisoners’ cell with his wife Emily when the prison
governor conveyed the good news. He remained calm and said, ‘I shall hope for something
better than that. At the same time I am thankful for the sake of my family.’ Mrs Laurence was
‘greatly relieved’, and ‘an affecting scene took place between her and her husband.’128
We have no corroborating evidence for claims about James Lister having had epilepsy,
or ‘being strange occasionally in his manner’, nor about the health of Simha, Justina and others.
Nevertheless, the case for James Frederick having a history of mental illness, including
psychotic episodes, seems sound, with clear evidence from those close to him.129
127
The Argus, 18 and 19 September 1879.
128
The Argus, 10 October 1789.
129
James’s younger brother Alexander was, as we have seen, subject to special conditions
detailed in the wills of each of his parents with the executors of the wills being given
authority to manage trust funds on Alexander’s behalf. Recent research has shown that an
‘Alexander Lester Lawrance’ was present in Camberwell Lunatic Asylum in Surrey in 1856.
Joseph and family lived in Surrey and he, Joseph, was one of the executors of his father
Zaccaria’s will. Alexander was admitted in the category of ‘Private’ as opposed to the
alternative ‘Pauper’ which indicates there was money to pay for his upkeep. Another
reference to an ‘Alexander Lister Laurence ‘is a police charge for ‘simple larceny’ while he
was in the asylum; he was acquitted. An earlier reference to Alexander is in a document
relating to Alexander Levy, in 1818 when he was aged 18 years, his father sponsored
Alexander's Articles of Agreement wherein Alex became Clerk to a London solicitor.
Further, correspondence with Laurence relatives in England confirms at least one case of
insanity in later generations.

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The Levy Coat of Arms

Anna Klein quotes the researcher Robert Barrett: ‘The
coat-of-arms granted to the Levy/Laurence family was
in fact the work of Zaccaria's son, Joseph, the ancestor
of Timothy Laurence, who had the arms he was granted
backdated to his father so that it could pass to all
Zaccaria's descendants. Like the so-called Venetian
origins, ‘all this adds to the glory of the family’, says
Barrett, who seems inordinately peeved by the
Levy/Laurences. However correspondence from the
College of Arms confirms that Zaccaria Levy was
granted a coat of arms on 11 December 1813 (see page
7). Moreover, the arms may be borne by all his (male)
descendants. The college has observed that, ‘assuming
that Murray Laurence is a direct descendant of this man
(James Levy) in a legitimate male line, then it would
follow that he is entitled to bear the arms granted to
Zaccaria Levy in 1813’.130
The arms were described in a letter from the
College of Arms to Commander Tim Laurence, dated
15 December 1992 as follows: ‘Argent two bees
volant, and in base a ship under sail proper on a chief
engrailed azure three beehives or and the crest an arm
embowed charged with a bee as in the arms and the hand grasping the thyrus all proper’. The
motto is Deus Nobiscum Quis Contra.
Simon Sebag Montefiore on Judaism in Spain

‘For 700 years Spain was Islamic and Arab. At its zenith Muslim Spain, known as Al-Andalus, was a
caliphate, an Islamic kingdom with divine blessing. The caliph’s capital Cordoba, in southern Spain,
was also the home of a huge Jewish population. The Muslims tolerated the Jews and even appointed
Jewish prime ministers. But Andalus was in decline and when the Christian kings of Castile in the north
began their Reconquista in the 13th century, the vicious struggle with the Islamic princes became a
savage crusade.
During anti-semitic violence many Jews converted to Christianity, but in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella,
the Catholic king and queen of the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile that made up the new monarchy,
conquered the last Muslim emirate of Granada and ordered the expulsion of all the Jews – unless they
converted. Thousands did, but somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 Jews left. Many of the Jews
who remained in Spain had become real Christians, but some still practised Judaism in secret and
became known as crypto-Jews. Their prayer books were Latin on the outside but Hebrew on the inside.
Ferdinand and Isabella felt their success was fragile, and created the Holy Office of the Inquisition to
find traitors and destroy them: their main targets were secret Jews or those possessing Impure Blood of
Jewishness.
The Inquisition was big business and the Crown grew rich from destroying secret Jews and seizing their
fortunes. Many were arrested and tortured. If found guilty, they were formally condemned in
spectacular public rituals, the auto-da-fé, often attended by the king in which they wore sinister hooded
robes, were publicly tortured and then garrotted or burned.’
130
The author reminds readers that this privilege, like that of Levite descent, is available to all
in a ‘legitimate male line’.

Murray Laurence
Author’s admission and acknowledgements

In the preamble I wrote that we explore in a no-man’s-land between the real lives of our
ancestors, those lives invented by them and their descendants, for purposes necessary, devious
or reckless, and the lives that we can imagine and reconstruct. I confess that in the past I have
been guilty of recklessness in telling part of this story.
Showing how easily family history can be distorted by folklore and misinformation and
half-truths repeated, in a story I wrote following a visit to Argentina in 1990 I reported that I
had been idly wandering through the Buenos Aires telephone directory and observed that there
were more Laurences than in Sydney: ‘Who was Maria de la Mercedes Laurence? I wondered.
‘Perhaps we shared the same great-great grandfather, James Lister Laurence, who was born in
Caracas and fought with Simon Bolivar in the liberation of three republics.’
In another article for a magazine in 1995 (on the subject of books chosen as travel
reading material) I wrote, even more fancifully, ‘I took Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The General
in His Labyrinth … and discovered in it an officer in Bolivar's army named Jose Lorenzo, who,
of course, must have been my great-great grandfather, James Laurence, who fought with Simon
Bolivar in the great wars of South American liberation.’
I am now surprised that someone more knowledgeable than I was didn’t seek to correct
me – my father Graham perhaps, or his brother Paul. But maybe they were not all that interested
in Bolivar whereas I was and the knowledge that a near ancestor had been involved was
seemingly sufficient to absolve me from concern for accuracy.131 My family had a copy of the
Jayme Lister journal (though we didn’t know him by that name), but I have no recollection of
when and how it appeared. Likewise with the family’s Jewish heritage, conversions and name
changes: it wasn’t until a family tree appeared in the 1980s or 90s, which at first glance seemed
an elaborate depiction of some narrative from the Old Testament (‘and Noah begat Shem, Ham
and Japheth …’), from where I don’t know, that I began to put a few isolated fragments
together. I had never heard of the ‘royal family’ link until an in-law presented my father with
a copy of that Canadian Jewish newsletter. These in-laws were themselves Iraqi Jews with a
lively interest in the (probably erroneous) Baghdad origins of Zaccaria Levy. Our families,
striving to maintain bourgeois standing after their arrival in Sydney in 1853, found it
convenient to forget, or alter, the past, and I detect the hands of George Massett and Charles
Albert in the management of this matter (and, in any case, we only need look at Joseph Levy
as the exemplar). Meanwhile, many of the families they married into would have been equally
focused on positioning themselves, or guarding position; after all, even a willingness to own
up to a convict past in Australia didn’t emerge until late in the twentieth century.
131
Lyrical acclaim such as this from Cuban Jose Marti describing his arrival in Caracas –
‘The story is told of a traveller who arrived in Caracas one night, and without shaking off the
dust from the road, did not ask where to eat or sleep, but where he could find Bolivar’s statue.
It is said that the traveller, alone among the tall and fragrant trees that lined the plaza, wept
before the statue, which seemed to be moving, like a father approaching a son. The traveller
did well, for all Americans should love Bolivar like a father – Bolivar, and all those who, like
him, fought so that America would belong to the American man’ – stirred my imagination,
and highlighted the want of such legendary figures in Australian history. Jose Marti, The
Golden Age.

Murray Laurence
There remains great scope for further research. It would be surprising if somewhere
amongst the descendants of James and Sarah in Australia there was not some as yet unexamined
material – images or letters which might reveal more to us about them as parents, about their
distinctive personalities. Equally, amongst the large number of descendants of Zaccaria and
Simha, most likely living in England, there might surely be found some useful documents.
There are as well, descendants of the Levy/Laurences and Montefiores who settled in the
Australian colonies in advance of James and Sarah who may possess material. In Australia we
are as yet only in contact with descendants of George, Charles and Matilda.
This essay could not have been written without the exemplary research undertaken by
Leigh Etherden over many years. Leigh is a descendant of George and Alma Laurence through
their daughter Dorothy Alma. When I expressed an interest in writing a ‘short monograph’ on
James Laurence she generously presented me with a large file of documents, all carefully
catalogued and available to me electronically; these included a detailed timeline of Laurence’s
life. She painstakingly transcribed Jayme Lister’s lengthy hand-written journal, as well as
transcribing wills and other opaque documents. Leigh has read drafts of each edition and
offered useful suggestions and necessary corrections. Being dedicated to the project, she has
continued to unveil new information and supporting documents, and has been in contact with
the College of Arms in England in order to clarify the origins of the Levy coat of arms.
Photographs of the arms are not permitted; Christopher Vane of the College of Arms provided
a sketch, which was much improved by Lindsay Etherden (see page 58).
Leigh has also been corresponding with descendants of Joseph Levy/Laurence in
England, most particularly Christopher Laurence (great-great grandson of Joseph and
Penelope) and his son Peter, who have provided valuable information on Joseph’s family, and
further information on Zaccaria and Venice; Angela Milner-Brown (whose husband is a
descendant of Joseph) has sent a detailed file on the family. Mary Burke, a descendant of
George Levy/Laurence, confirmed Levy Brothers as the original stockbroking firm; In
Australia, Leigh and I have received useful information from Michael D. Laurence, Tony
DuVernet, Peter Hohnen and Glenda and Michael R.L. Laurence. Andrei Laurence designed
the cover and enhanced the colours on the coat of arms.
Paul Laurence was the main source of what information my family had on the Laurence
past; it arrived in eclectic batches, seemingly unrelated, and frequently annotated; it was
accepted without a sufficiently inquiring mind, on my part at least, because I am sure I could
have interrogated Paul and found out much that would have been enlightening.
I am indebted to my mother’s sister Everil Taylor (née Murray) who wrote an
illuminating account of their mother’s family, the Corys, undertaking her research by legwork
in three countries in pre-digital days. A couple of quotations from her on family history begin
this essay. Everil taught me the importance of rescuing the women from the overlooked
recesses of history.
Adam Rahbee in the USA has been a willing, intuitive and informative correspondent,
even though DNA shows we are not related as first supposed.
I am entirely responsible for any errors, annoyances and detours. I have freely
expressed my own views on historical and political issues, and have speculated or made
suggestions on our forebears where the known facts are few.
murray.laurence@gmail.com leigheth@bigpond.net.au

Murray Laurence
ITHAKA Mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

And sensuous perfumes of every kind;
Setting out on the voyage to Ithaka As much as you can get of sensuous perfumes;
You must pray that the way be long, You must go to many cities of Egypt,
Full of adventures and experiences. To learn and still to learn from those who
The Laistrygonians, and the Kyklopes, know.
Angry Poseidon, - don’t be afraid of them; You must always have Ithaka in your mind
Arrival there is your predestination.
You will never find such things on your way,
But do not hurry the journey at all,
If only your thoughts be high, and a select
Better that it should last many years;
Emotion touch your spirit and your body. Be quite old when you anchor at the island,
The Laistrygonians, the Kyklopes, Rich with all you have gained on the way,
Poseidon raging – you will never meet them, Not expecting Ithaka to give you riches.
Unless you carry them with you in your soul, Ithaka has given you your lovely journey,
If your soul does not raise them up before you. Without Ithaka you would not have set out.
Ithaka has no more to give you now.
You must pray that the way be long;
Poor though you find it, Ithaka has not cheated
Many be the summer mornings
you.
When with what pleasure, what delight
Wise as you have become, with all your
You enter harbours never seen before;
experience,
At Phoenician trading stations you must stop,
You will have understood the meaning of an
And must acquire good merchandise,
Ithaka.
‘Ithaka’ appears at first as an uplifting address to Odysseus setting out on his legendary
homeward journey to Ithaka; but it soon reveals itself as a luminous metaphor for the journey
of life, a long road of adventure, discovery, demons, delights, treasure, wisdom and, finally,
understanding. It is almost the story of our ancestors’ own odyssey.
REFERENCES
Marie Arana, Bolivar: The Epic Life of the Man who Liberated South America.
Simon and Schuster, 2013
Matthew Brown, Adventuring Through Spanish Colonies: Simon Bolivar, Foreign Mercenaries and
the Birth of New Nations, Liverpool University Press, 2006
Manning Clark, A History of Australia Vol 4, Melbourne University Press, 1978
Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore, Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero, Harvard University Press, 2010
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789 – 1848, Sphere Books, 1973
Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, Collins Harville, 1987
Thomas Keneally, Australians, A Short History, Allen & Unwin, 2016
Emma Klein, Lost Jews: The Struggle for Identity Today, Springer, 2016
Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, White Men’s Countries and the
Challenge of Racial Equality, Cambridge University Press, 2008
John Lynch, Simon Bolivar, A Life, Yale University Press, 2006
Mark McKenna, ‘Moment of Truth. History and Australia’s Future’, Quarterly Essay, Issue 69, 2018
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth, Alfred A Knopf 1990
Stephen C Massett, Drifting About; Or what Jeems Pipes of Pipesville, Saw and Did, Carleton, 1863.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, ‘Blood and Gold: the Making of Spain with Simon Sebag Montefiore’, The
Daily Mail, 28 November 2015.
61

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Murray Laurence

RESEARCH LEIGH ETHERDEN

FOR ALANA CRUZ LAURENCE

3rd Edition August 2019

PREAMBLE: HISTORY AND IDENTITY

James and Sarah Laurence 2

James and Sarah Laurence 3

Preamble: history and identity 2

1. Jacob/James Levy/Laurence and Sarah Green 5

2. Family Background: Levys and Montefiores; ‘Laurence’ appears, radical assimilation

3. Sephardim in London and the world 10

5. Zaccaria Levy’s death and will 18

8. Marriage of James Lister Laurence and Sarah Henrietta Green in Mexico 33

9. Birth of James Frederick in Tampico and travel to the United States 34

11. Simha Levy/Laurence’s death and will 39

12. Journey to Australia 40

13. Life in New South Wales 42

14. James Laurence’s death 48

15. Sarah Laurence’s death 49

Epilogue: an uncharted voyage, a turbulent century 50

James and Sarah Laurence 4

1. JACOB/JAMES LEVY/LAURENCE AND SARAH GREEN

JACOB LEVY, FOREBEAR OF AN EXTENSIVE CLAN OF LAURENCES IN AUSTRALIA, and my great-

2. FAMILY BACKGROUND: LEVYS AND MONTEFIORES; ‘LAURENCE’ APPEARS,

James and Sarah Laurence 5

James and Sarah Laurence 6

The delirious tone of the Sunday Mail continues:

James and Sarah Laurence 7

James and Sarah Laurence 8

James and Sarah Laurence 9

3. SEPHARDIM IN LONDON AND THE WORLD

James and Sarah Laurence 10

‘abandonment of Christianity’. The Whigs, however, with a policy of religious toleration,

Green observes that:

James and Sarah Laurence 11

James and Sarah Laurence 12

James and Sarah Laurence 13

James and Sarah Laurence 14

James and Sarah Laurence 15

James and Sarah Laurence 16

James and Sarah Laurence 17

5. ZACCARIA LEVY’S DEATH AND WILL

James and Sarah Laurence 18

6. ADVENTURING IN SOUTH AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN WITH JAYME

James and Sarah Laurence 19

James and Sarah Laurence 20

James and Sarah Laurence 21

And concludes abruptly:

James and Sarah Laurence 22

7. ADVENTURING IN SOUTH AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN WITH JAYME

James and Sarah Laurence 23

James and Sarah Laurence 24

James and Sarah Laurence 25

James and Sarah Laurence 26

This is how historian Matthew Brown describes the Riohacha debacle:

James and Sarah Laurence 27

The diary resumes after the chaos at Riohacha:

James and Sarah Laurence 28

3 Nov – action of Rio Frio in the night, routed the enemy.