The Albury Clerical Scandal Deepens.

If you read Part One of this post, you might be forgiven for thinking that this scandalous episode was over for David, Margaret, and the family. An investigation was conducted into the complaints made about the Rev. David, and the Church’s Committee of Inquiry concluded that the complaints were entirely without foundation and that the Presbytery “…declare its unabated confidence…” in David’s character.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t over. I came across this very detailed editorial from the Albury Banner that gives a thorough account of the events of the inquiry but suggests there might have been questions about how the church handled the matter. This was published just a week after the outcome was announced. (Read left to right)

So, the Editor was happy with the process of the inquiry and its findings but they thought the Presbytery erred in not publishing the evidence of the inquiry. Evidence here I’m pretty sure is referring to the findings of the Inquiry and not any evidence against Rev. David.

Apparently, someone in the Presbyterian community agreed with the Editor’s views, and wanted that evidence published too. On 12th December 1868, just a month after the final judgement or “deliverance” was given, the Albury Banner published a letter signed “One of the Congregation”.

The correspondent raised the issue of the scandal again, and actually went further and named the husband of the young woman who had made the complaints against Rev. David. They also provided a full explanation of the investigation undertaken and provided an editorial on where they thought the committee had failed in its duty to the truth.

I think it is safe to assume with this level of insight that the author was a member of the committee or, at the very least, part of the Presbytery meeting at Beechworth when the full findings of the Inquiry were discussed and tabled.

Here is a copy of the letter; it is lengthy but full of fascinating insights into the issue.

Interjecting once again as I did in Part One, tapis in this context means that it was “on the table” for discussion. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/427876/meaning-and-origin-of-the-phraseon-the-tapis

As for the rumours having been around for two years, that is new information to me. The earliest mention I can find of the issue is the initial rumour article that the Ovens and Murray Advertiser printed on 12th November 1868, as referred to in (Article 1.)

And there, in (Part Two) of the letter, above, is the husband, named in print, Mr Thomas. He was actually Henry George Thomas. His wife was the young woman who, before their marriage, revealed to him that there had been “…certain improprieties…” between her and the Rev. David. Her name was Mrs Mary Eliza Thomas (née Torr).

Mary and Henry were married in November 1867 in Albury. Mary apparently had been a member of the Presbyterian congregation for many years before this and was also a teacher at the Presbyterian school known as the Albury Model School. I managed to find two small mentions of Miss Torr in Trove, which was like finding gold.

Her name did not come up in a keyword search, but when I searched for Albury Model School, I found mentions of her in two articles. This was after about an hour of searching.

How incredible to find this description of Mary and what she was teaching, and look who I found listed just under this column in the prize lists.

That is Rev. David and Margaret Ballantyne’s daughter, Jessie Davina Ballantyne, my 2x-great-grandmother; she was 10 years old at the time.

Here is the second mention of Mary (Miss Torr), and it further highlights the connections between her, Rev. David and the Ballantynes.

I managed to uncover a little bit of information on Henry as well. He was a local photographer who had moved to the area only a couple of years before he and Mary married.

Tiled Gallery 1: Courtesy of Trove, National Library of Australia

Next, I found listings for both of them on Ancestry.com.au, but unfortunately, no photos of them were shared in any of the trees. A couple did have photos of their final resting places in Whitefield Cemetery at Wangaratta, Victoria.

Mary passed away in 1905 in her mid-50s and Henry in 1922 in his early 80s. According to the information shared in their family tree, they went on to have 13 children during their marriage.

Tiled Gallery 2: Courtesy of Findagrave.com.au, Generously shared by Dianne Lewis

Returning to “One of the Congregation’s” letter, it is interesting to note that, according to the author, a meeting had taken place between the secretary of the Church and Mr Thomas some five months before he penned the letter. The purpose of this meeting was to discuss the issue of the improprieties.

He also reveals that a second meeting had taken place between the Committee and Mr Thomas when it was felt that nothing was being done to address the issue. It was only then, as a result of this second conversation, that the official inquiry took place.

As I stated in Part One, it was a complicated issue, but finding these little nuggets of information that flesh out the story’s bones are just fantastic. The letter continues:

Mr M’Millan is referring to the Reverend John Kennedy McMillan; he was the resident minister of Beechworth at the time, and Mr Greig was the Reverend James Greig, minister at Yackandandah.

Here is a map to put us in the picture as to where they all were in relation to each other.

And next, is a stunning photo of the church at Beechworth, where the initial findings on Rev. David’s behaviour were shared with the Presbytery in November 1868.

The church still stands today, 169 years later.

Again, back to the letter.

“…paragraph that appeared in a Beechworth paper…” is, I’m assuming, referring to the article shown in (Figure 1) above, and as I shared in Part One of this series of posts, the Editor of the Albury Banner was not happy with their contemporary perpetuating these rumours.

I managed to find the original editorial the Albury Banner published on 14 November 1868. (Part One had the Cornwall Chronicle’s truncated version of this, shown in (Article 2:Part One))

This full editorial was published on the 14th of November, just a week before the one shown in (Article 1) above, and the difference in tone is stark. This earlier editorial does not name Rev. David or seem to doubt his innocence, whereas the one a week later has a decided change in its tone, with an undercurrent of not being so sure. I can only imagine Rev. David and Margaret must have been very disheartened by this change.

One thing the later editorial did provide was to clear up one of the problems I identified in Part One: namely, how the Cornwall Chronicle in Tasmania could be mentioning the inquiry findings on the 25th of November, a day after the inquiry in Beechworth was held on the 24th of November.

And of course, the answer was that the inquiry actually took place well before this date. I’m assuming this would have been the meeting with Henry Thomas five months earlier. The meeting on the 24th in Beechworth was obviously just to discuss the findings of that inquiry.

I also found the small mention below, published alongside the editorial above, showing how seriously the church regarded this issue: the peddling of rumours about their minister in the pages of the Ovens and Murray Advertiser.

The level of detail in this letter about what the author believed should have occurred in handling this matter, really highlighted for me its complexity. To try and get a better understanding I did a bit of digging into what the structure of the Presbyterian protocol for complaint handling was at the time. I know, so niche and so specific, I wasn’t hopeful.

Wow, I shouldn’t have worried; the new Google AI search assistant provided lots of information, and yes, I double-checked the references given. The protocol I was to learn was firmly based on the strict Scottish-derived ecclesiastical polity, called the “Book of Discipline”.https://pcnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/PCNSW-Constituting-Documents-2021.pdf

Depending on the severity of the complaint, there was a rigid structure that needed to be followed, starting at the local level or Kirk Session, moving on to the Regional Presbytery level and then finally the full Synod/General Assembly. PCNSW Constituting Documents

From the small amount that I have read so far, I think what the author of the letter might have had an issue with apart from the evidence not being published, was that the complaint against Rev. David was being handled at the incorrect level, the Kirk Session.

This level was the local governing body, consisting of a single minister and local elders; it usually handled minor grievances and local reports, but any serious charge against a Minister, like Rev. David was facing, had to be escalated to the Regional Presbytery, as a Session could not legally judge its own Minister. https://pcnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/PCNSW-Constituting-Documents-2021.pdf

The Presbytery was the regional governing body that held the primary jurisdiction and duty to investigate complaints against a minister. https://pcnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/ConstitutingDocumentsofthePCNSW.pdf

It seems the Rev. McMillan was indeed trying to fulfill the Presbytery’s obligation to address the charge by inviting the Rev. Greig to join the investigation. Still, perhaps the author was hoping for more ministers to participate in the inquiry. At the time, there were at least three other congregations that I can confirm made up the full Beechworth Presbytery: Chiltern: The Rev. William B. Hutchison; Benalla: The Rev. Alexander Murdoch; and Wangaratta: The Rev. John Robertson.

It may be that the author of the letter had missed seeing the Albury Banner’s Editorial (Article 1) above, which clearly shows there was an array of Elders and Committee members involved in the initial inquiry. Interestingly, he doesn’t refer to them at all in his letter as being part of the inquiry, only mentioning the Rev. McMillan and Greigs as being involved. And surely if he was part of the committee, he would have known all these other gentlemen were involved. Perhaps he had another agenda at play here.

I was also able to confirm that at this time in 1868, there was no separate Albury Presbytery; it was actually attached to the Victorian Colonial Church structure, and as such the Presbytery of Beechworth was the governing full Regional Presbytery for the Albury area. https://gpcw.org.au/about-us/our-history/ https://companyofangels.net/Early%20History%20of%20the%20Church%20-%20Albury%20-%201906.html

The letter continues again:

A couple of notable mentions from these two parts above.

Describing the Rev. McMillan as highly censurable means the author believes he had acted unethically or that he had handled the issue in a reprehensible manner. https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/censurable

I mean those are strong words to choose and leave no doubt as to how the author felt about the Rev. McMillan.

Also, the other evidence mentioned, or the suggestion, that the Rev. McMillan had other information that he was suppressing, that would somehow have supported Rev. David’s guilt. I cannot find any further mention of this evidence anywhere; it certainly hasn’t revealed itself in any other publications to date.

And then there is that description of Mrs Thomas as a designing woman. In this context, and especially for the time—the 1860s—it was suggesting that she was a scheming or manipulative woman who used social strategies to manoeuvre outside the strict Victorian class and gender expectations. It was meant as a slur against Mrs Thomas’s reputation. https://dictionary.reverso.net/english-definition/designing+woman

So it is clear from the details shared in these last two parts that the author of the letter thought that the investigation and the resulting vindication of the Rev. David were a foregone conclusion from the start. That the Church committee was given no chance to question the outcome of the inquiry and that if other evidence and more independent investigators were involved, there would have been a very different outcome for the Rev. David. I think the author definitely reveals himself here as a committee member. Who else would have this level of detail of the machinations that were at play?

Concerning the meetings that the author mentions above, I have discovered that in the first instance he was referring to a Presbytery Committee meeting that was held on Monday, the 4th January 1869; this is where he suggests that Rev. McMillan was informing the committee how he would bring up the “…deliverance…” and the “…clear vindication of his innocence.” that being, Rev. David’s innocence. There is no transcript or article printed on this meeting; the mention of it here in this letter is the only reference to it happening.

Two other meetings happened that week in addition to the committee meeting. A Presbytery meeting on Tuesday the 5th January and a Full Congregation meeting the following night on Wednesday the 6th January. There are records of both meetings and lots of action happened as a result, which we will discuss in part three of this post.

It is interesting to note here, too, in these two parts of the letter above, that the author is bemoaning the fact that they were told not to listen to “…rumours“. This is very strange, as not relying on rumours is the actual basis of “the libel” or formal charge that the Presbytery must follow. A charge of a serious moral nature, such as the one that the Rev. David was being accused of, had to be framed in a legal-ecclesiastical document specifying the exact charges, the time, the place, and the witnesses involved. https://pcnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/PCNSW-Constituting-Documents-2021.pdf

The “…deliverance…” refers to the full findings of the investigation that were read out to the congregation. Yes, you read that correctly; they were read out to the whole congregation at Mass on Sunday the 15th of November 1868, by a senior church Elder, Mr Alex Jackson. These details were confirmed in the transcript of the libel trial the Thomases took out against Mr Jackson.

Here is a copy of the deliverance; and it is so lucky for us, it too was part of the libel trial transcript.

Wow, Rev. Macmillan didn’t hold back in his assessment of the Thomases. They apparently were not in the congregation that Sunday when this was read out to their community.

I think we have hit on the main motivating factor for “One of the Congregation” in penning this letter. He confirms as much in his final thoughts below.

It is the struggle of the classes and the injustice between those who, the author believes, can wield no influence, like the Thomases and those who can, like the Church and the Rev. David, that the author is really invested in. It wasn’t just the simple objective of seeing justice done for all that motivated him to send in this letter.

I have sat on many committees in my time, and the tone of this letter is so familiar to me. The disdain, which is barely veiled by the false restraint and adherence to procedure, and talk about going DEFCON 1.

You’d be forgiven for thinking from that tone that the author really believed that Rev. David was a sexual predator living in their midst who had manipulated the Presbytery and Committee into believing in his innocence.

There is no doubt that the Albury Banner Editor picked up on this shift in attitude that the author was alluding to in his letter. That being of a growing uneasiness in the committee and the congregation towards the members of the Presbytery and their inquiry and its outcome.

Check out his editorial published the same day as “One of the Congregations” letter. (Read Left to Right)

Article 3: Courtesy of Trove, National Library of Australia

Wow, the sway this one letter had. Now the Editor is convinced that the original inquiry was not free from reasonable objections, that the majority of the congregation now believe this to be true as well, that the Thomases had their right of appeal taken away from them, that there was further evidence against Rev. David that wasn’t produced, and that the Rev. Mr Ballantyne sullied his refined and Christian self by describing the press as “…low wretches…” Nothing has changed, has it? I have seen this same strategy used in the press just today.

This is not the end of the story yet, far from it. This letter becomes the catalyst for a war of words in the local press, a high-profile resignation and another full Regional Presbytery Inquiry into the charges.

In addition to this, we also have the Supreme Court libel case Mary and Henry Thomas brought against Mr Jackson, the elder who read out the deliverance to the congregation. All this will be the focus of Part Three.