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In death as in life, a pillar of the community

Graveyard Shift: Every Body Has a Story. In the second of our 2024 series exhuming forgotten stories in the Melbourne General Cemetery, we meet Thomas Fulton, a Scottish engineer whose untimely death was mourned by a funeral procession a mile long. Major Xu reports.

In death as in life, a pillar of the community

Thomas Fulton's grave in the Melbourne General Cemetery. Photo: Major Xu

Story by Major Xu
 

Princes Bridge, Melbourne’s grandest and oldest Yarra crossing, was lined on both sides with hordes of spectators in February 1859. They were paying respects – and, likely, gawking –  as Thomas Fulton’s hearse, followed by a number of mourning coaches filled with relatives, made its way to the Central Cemetery, according to a contemporary report in The Age.

 

Behind the family travelling over the long stone arch were members of both houses of Parliament, the mayor and city councillors. These were followed by 100 of the dead man’s workers walking two abreast, according to contemporary news reports (which included The Cairns Post in Queensland and Tasmania’s Launceston Examiner as well as local paper The Age). With 100 carriages and gigs and many more mounted and walking mourners bringing up the rear, the funeral procession was estimated at more than a mile long.

Fulton was born in 1813, in Dundee, Scotland, to a wrought-iron worker. He arrived in Melbourne with his own young family in 1842, and set up an iron foundry in Flinders Street that went on to employ a workforce of 150 men. He also constructed a steam engine for the first mill in Melbourne, reportedly cutting the square-threaded screws by hand as the lathe was too small.

Contemporary journalist Edmund Mason Finn described Fulton in his book, Chronicles of Early Melbourne 1835-1852. The Scottish engineer, he said, was:

“the sort of man for an infant settlement; skillful, and industrious, strong of mind, iron in frame, outspoken, and honest to the backbone…”

Thomas Fulton: Engineer, magistrate and a Melbourne city councillor in 1854-59,  said to be popular for his “homely and racy eloquence”.

Thomas Fulton: Engineer, magistrate and a Melbourne city councillor in 1854-59,  said to be popular for his “homely and racy eloquence”.

Thomas Fulton was not only an engineer. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, he was also the first deacon of the Congregational Church in Victoria, and paid much of the cost of setting up churches in Lonsdale Street and St Kilda churches. Fulton was a magistrate and a Melbourne city councillor in 1854-59 and said to be popular for his “homely and racy eloquence”.

He was also said to be deeply humane, leaving Scotland in part due to his horror at the child labour he witnessed in industrial mills, according to one obituary. In Melbourne, he was so well-liked by his men for his “frankness and fairness” that they gave him a letter of loyalty and a silver tray in 1858.

But it was his technical prowess that saw Fulton honoured with a medal at the Melbourne Exhibition in 1854 (now in Museum Victoria’s collection). It also took him to Bendigo (then called Sandhurst), Victoria’s richest Gold Rush town, where he hoped to construct a quartz-crushing machine of his own invention.

It was an accident caused by a lack of technical sophistication that killed him. The Bendigo Mercury records that on 18 February 1859, Fulton was anxious to inspect the fittings of pipes in a mining shaft.  He descended the shaft “not in the usual bucket, but standing upon a board”, holding the rope to maintain his position. “[B]y some accident it appears that the pinions got out of gear, and the barrel revolved with frightful velocity”.

Fulton fell about 30 metres, and despite the amputation of his shattered left leg, died from his injuries that night.

Fulton was survived by his wife, Elizabeth, and seven of eight children.

The medal presented to Thomas Fulton at the Melbourne Exhibition, 1854. Source: Museum Victoria

The medal presented to Thomas Fulton at the Melbourne Exhibition, 1854. Source: Museum Victoria

The crowds who watched Fulton’s final journey across Princes Bridge were not unusual, according to Bonnie, officer of the Melbourne General Cemetery, which opened in 1853.

“It [was] quite normal in the 19th century,” she said. “People would come out on the stage to watch the coffin go by [as if they were] from politics or celebrities.”

As the funeral procession arrived at Fulton’s grave site, his coffin was borne by eight senior workmen from the foundry.

Nearly 200 years later, Thomas Fulton’s tombstone stands quietly in a corner of the Melbourne General Cemetery. Though its top pillar is broken, it remains a towering standing monument with “engineer” engraved on the tombstone, just behind his name.

About The Citizen

THE CITIZEN is a publication of the Centre for Advancing Journalism. It has several aims. Foremost, it is a teaching tool that showcases the work of the students in the University of Melbourne’s Master of Journalism and Master of International Journalism programs, giving them real-world experience in working for publication and to deadline. Find out more →

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