LOCAL HISTORY

Edward Holland of Dumbleton

Prior to World War II, Beverly Hills went by the name of Dumbleton. It derived this name from Dumbleton Farm, a large market garden established in the 1880s in the vicinity of present-day Beverly Hills Public School. How did it get its name?

Dumbleton Farm was the property of an English immigrant, Edward Holland, who came from an interesting family.

Edward’s grandfather, Swinton Holland, was a partner in Baring Brothers, the bankers, and a land-owner in Knutsford, Cheshire. Knutsford was the thinly-disguised setting for Mrs Gaskell’s popular novel, Cranford, and Edward’s mother was a cousin of the author. Edward’s father, Frederick Holland, had been a Commander in the Royal Navy, then retired to an estate at Ashbourne, Derbyshire. Frederick was a friend of Charles Dickens, and was one of the founders of the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. Edward, born in 1851, possibly at Ashbourne, was one of seven children. He was likely named after his uncle Edward, Frederick’s brother, who was a farming innovator with a property at the village of Dumbleton, in Norfolk, which no doubt the whole family was familiar with.

Frederick died in 1860, by which time 9-year old Edward was probably at boarding-school. We don’t know where Edward studied, and he does not appear to have followed his father into the Navy. It is not clear why he came to Australia. Perhaps he was the family black sheep, packed off to New South Wales, or perhaps he came here seeking his fortune.

He was in Sydney by 1879, and married, though we do not know if he married in England. His wife Elizabeth (Lily) gave birth to several children in Sydney: Lilian (born Paddington 1879), Edward Junior (born Paddington 1880), and Ellen (born and died at Pennant Hills 1886-1887). The Holland family came to our area in the early 1880s,

Belmore Road Dumbleton Date Unknown

and are known to have been at Dumbleton, Hurstville by September 1883¹. However their stay here was not overlong. Edward Holland offered the Dumbleton Estate for sale in January 1885. The property consisted of 37 acres, including an established orchard of choice fruit trees, and residence². It adjoined the Dalmorton and MacMahon Estates, and ‘would suit gentlemen on the lookout for a country seat in the elevated Hurstville area, ten minutes’ easy drive from the station.’

It looks as though the estate was slow to sell, because in October 1885, Mrs Holland was still at Dumbleton, and advertising for the services of a dressmaker. In December 1885, Edward advertised the auction of his household effects³. These included cows and breeding porkers, as well as two 400-gallon water-tanks, an essential item at a time of unreliable water supply.

In September 1886, described as freeholder, he was one of those who petitioned for the establishment of Hurstville as a municipality. But at about this time, the family relocated to The Croft, a property at Pennant Hills, where again they established an orchard. In January 1888, Edward submitted a long, bad poem to the Australian Town and Country Journal, ‘To Australia’, in celebration of Australia’s centenary. The opening couplet is enough:

‘Awake young nation! Let thy children greet / The day that sees thy hundredth year complete!’

The begetter of Dumbleton did not make old bones: Edward Holland, son of Commander Frederick Holland, died at Melbourne on 1 August 1898, aged only 47. The name ‘Dumbleton’ lived on, however, occasionally shortened to ‘Dumbo’, until it was supplanted by the more glamorous ‘Beverly Hills’ in the 1940s.

¹ NSW Government Gazette 7 September 1883, p4895, list of unclaimed letters. ² Sydney Morning Herald 10 January 1885, p16. ³ Sydney Morning Herald 12 December 1885, p20.