Toowoomba’s Mrs Preston suffered a gruesome death 165 years ago that caused a political furore heard all the way to the halls of power in Brisbane, and helped establish a Toowoomba legend. I told a version of this story live on Darling Downs radio 4AK.
It was October 1861 in Toowoomba, summer had come early, and people were already feeling the heat. None more so than the unfortunate Mrs Ann Preston who was suffering from the effects of intemperance, to which she was habitually addicted. Tragically she mixed rum with strychnine which had a fatal effect.
And that’s where the sorry tale began and it produced feelings of horror and disgust for all who knew of it.
Mrs Preston’s fourteen-year-old daughter Jane was in tears when she called into the home of Mr William Groom. Mr Groom was a former transported convict, he was the inaugural mayor of Toowoomba, a member of Queensland parliament, and would later be elected to Australia’s inaugural federal parliament. A sandstone memorial to his son Sir Littleton Groom holds pride of place at the top of the range just as you arrive in Toowoomba.
Jane pleaded for Mr Groom’s help following her mother’s tragic death the previous day. The mayor agreed and instituted a magisterial inquiry chaired by himself. It was to be held in Toowoomba’s Royal Hotel which was owned by the mayor’s brother-in-law Fred Mole. The hotel had previously been the site of a number of inquiries and sudden deaths.
That’s when the trouble started. No sooner had the inquiry begun than the coroner Doctor William Armstrong, who previously was nowhere to be found, arrived back in town and got wind of it.
Dr Armstrong had settled in Drayton in the 1850s and was the first doctor on the Darling Downs, he was instrumental in founding the Toowoomba Hospital and had been appointed coroner for the Darling Downs when it was still under the New South Wales government. He complained bitterly that his authority was being usurped, and by the Toowoomba mayor who was a former convict no less.
Mr Groom proceeded regardless and instructed Toowoomba’s Doctor Frederick Sasche, who incidentally had been wounded in the Prussian revolution of 1848, to hold a post-mortem examination forthwith.
The inquiry was completed, but the furore was not, because Dr Armstrong took his compliant all the way to the colony’s first attorney-general Ratcliffe Pring in Brisbane. The whole putrid story then emerged.
When the deceased Mrs Preston’s daughter Jane went to Mr. Groom with tears in her eyes, the temperature in Toowoomba was touching on 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The girl told him that the smell of her mother’s body was so bad that no one could stay in the room, the corpse was fly blown, and maggots were actually crawling out of her mother’s mouth.
When Mr Groom instructed Dr Sasche to perform the autopsy, the doctor said that that if the procedure was not done immediately, the body would be so putrid and the smell so bad that he wouldn’t have been able to it at all.
With the controversy still smouldering in Toowoomba, the coroner Dr Armstrong held his own official inquiry into Mrs Preston’s death.
And as for Mr William Groom, he so liked the location of his controversial inquest, the Royal Hotel, that be bought the hotel off his brother-in-law as the first of a string of hotel investments. With shrewd investments and decisiveness, Groom’s legend continued to grow culminating with his historic election as the first and only transported convict to ever sit in federal parliament.
So in a way, Mrs Preston’s gruesome maggoty end in 1861 actually enriched Toowoomba folklore and helped forge a legend.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO A VERSION OF THIS STORY TOLD ON 4AK.
Photo credits:
The Putrid Death that Forged a Legend – Harold Peacock with Copilot.
William Henry Groom – State Library of Queensland.
Aerial view of Toowoomba showing the roof of the Royal Hotel at the far right, 1891 – State Library of Queensland.
The Toowoomba Hospital and new Victoria Wing, the latter in the foreground – Darling Downs Gazette, 16th August 1899, page 3.
