Thomas Browne
BROWNE, Thomas Henry Johnson, (1818-1882)
T H J Browne (Tom or Satan) was born on April 7, 1818 in London. Browne undertook articled training as both an architect and civil engineer. He worked on the London to Birmingham railway under Sir Charles Fox from 1832-1839, then with William Nicholson, a civil engineer of Manchester, to whose practice he succeeded in 1848, and his own London practice from 1854-1862.
During this period Browne married and had a large family. At the London Central Criminal Court in May 1862, he was convicted of forging money orders and sentenced to ten years transportation to Western Australia, arriving at Fremantle late in 1863 on the Lord Dalhousie. For eighteen months Browne was employed in the Office of Works Department of the Convict Establishment at Fremantle, working on the Fremantle lunatic asylum erected during 1861-65. His watercolour of the completed building, The New Lunatic Asylum, and Invalid Depot, Fremantle, Western Australia, was painted in 1866.
After receiving his ticket of leave on 12 June 1865, Browne was self employed. He may have moved to Bunbury around this time, and at the end of 1865 Browne was appointed schoolmaster at Ferguson. Browne attempted to have some of his children brought to WA as assisted migrants, apparently unsuccessfully, and resigned his teaching position about the time he gained his conditional pardon, in December 1869.
After a period away from Fremantle, possibly at the abortive 1870 Peterwangy gold rush to the Irwin River near Geraldton, Browne set himself up as an architect engineer and land agent at the port. Because of the numerous Tom Brown(e)s in the colony at the time, he acquired the distinguishing nickname of 'Satan‟, a reference to his black hair, sallow complexion and lean visage. His sentence expired on 11 May 1872 and he was declared a free man, an expiree.
The major public work proposed for Fremantle from 1869 to 1875 was the Harbour Improvement Scheme, for which three tenders were received: from Browne, S.W. Bickley and from the surveyor and director of Public Works, Malcolm Fraser (who also happened to chair the commission which was to award the contract). Predictably, Fraser’s tender was chosen, but the new Governor Robinson persuaded his council to over rule the recommendation and send Browne’s cheaper scheme to London for professional appraisal by Sir John Coode, a leading civil engineer. In the interim Browne was appointed Inspector of Works on the Geraldton to Northampton railway.
Browne then started planning a connecting system of railways throughout WA, including a Fremantle Perth railway that crossed the Swan River at Point Resolution. Difficulties soon arose with the organisation and finances of both projects and Browne was dismissed in 1876.
By this time Browne had cut off all English ties, his wife being dead and his children indifferent. In October 1875 he married the much younger Mary Ann Letch in the Fremantle Congregational Church, but was soon facing problems with this marriage. Their first child, a daughter, was born at Geraldton in May 1877, but died of sunstroke when she was six months old. Compounding their difficulties, engineer and contractor Browne was adjudged a bankrupt at Geraldton in August 1877.
Browne and his wife moved to Perth, but by then no civil engineer’s position in government service was open to an expiree. He made a precarious living as an architect engineer draftsman, one commission being to draw a bird’s eye view of the Jarrahdale Timber Company’s works. He also spent much time and effort on a plan for a new road and traffic bridge. Again, this came to nothing, partly because of a vicious personal vendetta against Browne by the new director of Public Works, James Thomas.
In 1878-1879 Browne advertised as a surveyor, civil engineer and architect with offices in Hay Street, Perth. Around this time, he provided articled training to the first WA born architect Henry Stirling Trigg (1860-1919), also the first Australian born architect to practise in the State. Professional architectural practice requires certain affluence, or a market, to exist. With the impoverished days of pre gold rush Western Australia, little could be spared for enriching the built environment.
Generally, early building was crude and, away from Perth and Fremantle, often owner designed and built. In the difficult economic surroundings and with little optimism for the immediate prospects of the colony, it was very difficult for Browne to earn an income in private practice.
Browne continued to maintain a precarious living with his various occupations in Perth until April 1880, when he opened a grand hotel and pleasure garden around the disused mill in South Perth, renamed the Alta Gardens Hotel.
Despite a healthy trade, as Browne had no capital, the venture was debt laden. On 12 January 1882 the 63 year old was found guilty of criminal activities over a land transaction. In prison that night, waiting to be sentenced, he committed suicide by taking strychnine.
Browne remains best known for his water colour paintings of colonial buildings from the 1860s.
References:
Taylor, Dr John J., Thomas Henry Johnson Browne; accessed October 4, 2024
The Inquirer and Commercial News, 22.2.1878, p3.
