George James Capel, photographer and date unknown. Courtesy Ann Tovel
George, his second wife Harriet, and daughter Mamie Mary eventually immigrated to Australia around 1895 where they settled in Brisbane. In his typical fashion, George soon wrote his first impressions of Brisbane to the Editor of the Brisbane Courier:
Sir – “Will you allow me space in your paper for a few remarks? My excuse is that I am a travelled Anglo American and that I wish to make my home here.
I hope your readers will take what I write in good part. In all my travels I never came across a country so beautiful and so full of resources as yours and I certainly never resided in such a remarkable town as Brisbane. It strikes the stranger as the city of hotels. The people who built it must have been a very thirsty people. A wonderful city is Brisbane, full of splendid public buildings with well laid out and well-kept streets and charming parks; a well governed city too. Truly everything is beautiful here. But where are your Cathedrals – where are the magnificent Catholic and Protestant cathedrals one sees in the United States and, in fact, everywhere else? Where is the Young Men’s Christian in Association -generally a splendid and attractive structure, with its gymnasium and lecture halls and other things necessary for the mental and physical recreation and reunion of the young men of other cities? Where is the public library, that most needful requirement for both young and old?
You have a museum and a splendid collection heaped up together for lack of space in such a manner that one leaves the building saddened instead of refreshed. Your legislators, what are they doing? Since I have been here they have been frittering away their valuable time on a shop-closing bill that could well have been put in the Factory Act, left in the hands of the city authorities, or people themselves since, if the shops are closed, there is nowhere for the young people to spend their evenings unless it be in the public house or the streets. There is no public library, no well-appointed Young Men’s Christian Association rooms, and the parks are closed. The circle your legislators engage in is too small and their ideas too contracted for a splendid country such as this. Their time should be devoted to bringing Queensland before the world and building up what would in other hands be one of the most prosperous and wealthy countries on earth. Here it is paradise teeming with God’s goodness and every blessing and the people starving mentally and bodily. Truly, it is pitiable. The travelled man sees this and wonders. There is talk of an exhibition. Now, here is an opening to bring the country and its resources before the world. Well illustrated Queensland literature should be sent broadcast throughout the United States and Europe. Every newspaper office, every hotel, and every place of public resort in these countries should have descriptive illustrated sheets posted on the walls. At every railway station Queensland should meet the eye of the traveller. Your colonial newspapers should be subsidised and great editions printed for foreign circulation. This is what has been done and is being done in California and foreign capital has come in and the desert there has blossomed like a rose and the people are happy and prosperous. Advertising always pays, it has built up the fortunes of thousands of enterprising men, and countries can be built up in the same way. Advertising is a scriptural command for does not the divine oracle say “Put not your light under a bushel”
Let there be no dissentient voice in a question so vital to the interests of the country as this: let everybody pull together, and success will be the result. “Tis true Queensland must advance even if its people remain asleep: but why not wake up now and give happiness and prosperity to thousands in other lands who have no idea of the resources or beauty of this country.
I am, sir & c.
GEORGE JAMES CAPEL.[i]
In 1903 on the Electoral Roll, George was recorded as living Swan’s Road, Taringa and by 1908 he was living in Wecker Road, Mt Gravatt. It is believed the residence there is the one he often referred to in his correspondence as ”The Tent”:
Humour and Sarcasm at Threescore and Ten.
Mr. George J. Capel wrote to the Belmont Shire Council from “The Tent,” Mount Gravatt, stating that he and a baker’s carter saved a culvert bridge in Wecker-road from destruction by fire. The carter fortunately had a bucket with him, and they worked like Trojans. “I think,” wrote George, “our efforts are worthy of acknowledgment. The carter is a Freemason, and a little Masonic charm for his watch chain would be suitable. As regards myself, I am an old indigenous man, nearly 70, not long enough in Australia to get a pension, and can expect nothing. Indeed, as the Federal Government are about to tax my tea and kerosene to pay 10s. a week to younger and abler men than myself, I shall consider myself lucky if you do not bring me in debt. It seems the Australian style to crush the oldest and weakest.” Mr. Capel’s letter caused a little amusement, but it also excited sympathy, and the chairman was authorised to in some way reward the ancient hero and his friend the bread carter.[ii]
In 1910 when the Brisbane Courier reported receiving a copy of an edition of The Clevedon Mercury on its Jubilee and informed the readers about the foundation of the newspaper by George, it was mentioned that:
Mr. Capel will be remembered as a well-known advertising agent who successfully produced the “Merry Silver Ball,” once suspended under the veranda of the Courier Building. Ill-health and old age necessitated his retirement from active life.[iii]
From what I can ascertain the Merry Silver Ball was a men’s clothing shop owned by Alfred Merry in the Courier Building and was something of a landmark in Brisbane. I assume George procured a giant silver ball to promote the shop.
George also published and printed books. One which I think he would have enjoyed to read himself was The Wild Flowers of Clevedon by A.E.L. 67pp, Clevedon: George James Caple, 1877. Another which he is said to have compiled and printed himself was How to Make and Save Money: a book for the Station, Farm. Hotel, Home and Everybody, 1903.[v]
Sadly, George James Capel passed away from Heart Disease not long after the Mercury’s Jubilee at his Wecker Road residence on New Year’s Eve, 1911 and he was buried at the South Brisbane Cemetery. In his obituary mentioned previously, The Clevedon Mercury also said:
Information reached us by the Australian mail on Saturday of the death of Mr. George James Caple, formerly of this town, which took place on the 30th of December last at Mount Gravatt, near Brisbane, Queensland, where he had resided for several years, having had two attacks of paralysis. He was in the hospital for a month or two, but died very peacefully at his residence, having expressed a wish to be taken home to die amongst his flowers. He was in indigent circumstances at the time of his death, and left no estate of any kind. His Brisbane friends had a great regard for him, though they found him very reticent on all matters connected with his English home. He was 72 years of age and leaves a widow and grown up family of four sons and three daughters.
MEMOIR
“The wave is breaking on the shore,
The echo fading from the chime;
Again the shadow moveth o’er
The dial plate of Time – Whittier[iv]
George’s second wife, Harriet Jacqueline Capel passed away 27th August 1915 and is buried alongside George James. Although his obituary said he was 72 and his daughter Mamie said he was 71 years old, both George and Harriet were, in fact, 67 years old when they died.
There is no doubt that George James Capel lived a very interesting, entrepreneurial, at times controversial and globetrotting life. His favourite saying might have indeed been self-prophesying. Much of his public life has been documented in the press but his private life was almost equally controversial in his later years. I have developed quite an affection for George during my research – I think he would have been quite the character and a very interesting conversationalist. As the anniversary of his passing 116 years ago is almost upon us, I will be thinking of him and appreciating his contribution to the family that is mine, but also to the wider world of communities in which he lived. May he rest in peace.
©Lynette Nunn 2017
[i] Capel, George James, Brisbane Courier. ‘Queensland’s Opportunity, To the Editor’, 5 Oct 1895, n.p.
[ii] Brisbane Courier, ‘Humour and Sarcasm at Threescore and Ten’, 8 Oct 1908 p.4
[iii] Brisbane Courier, ‘Jubilee Number of an English Newspaper’, 21 June 1910, p. 6
[iv] Sercombe, William George, Clevedon Mercury, ’Death of Mr. G.J. Caple Founder of the Clevedon Mercury’, 24 February, 1912, n.p.
[v] State Library of Qld, http://tinyurl.com/mnpy8j8 accessed June 201
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