William Halse Gatty Jones | Glandwr Hall, Barmouth

The life of my first cousin four times removed, William Halse Gatty Jones, crossed two hemispheres and several distinct Victorian worlds.

Known within the family as Gatty Jones, he was born into the professional life of the City of London, educated at Merchant Taylors’ School and trained as a solicitor. In Australia, he became a lawyer, mining official, sporting administrator and elected member of the Victorian Parliament. Returning to Britain, he resumed his legal career, held senior office in one of London’s ancient livery companies and eventually settled at Glandwr Hall in Merionethshire.

His journey was not the simple progress of a colonial adventurer who made a fortune and returned home in triumph. It was more complicated, and more revealing. Gatty moved repeatedly between professional work and inherited land, metropolitan institutions and rural obligations, colonial ambition and family expectation.

His life demonstrates how misleading it can be to imagine nineteenth-century rural Wales as isolated. The families associated with the farms and estates of Merionethshire were connected to London, Melbourne and the wider imperial economy through law, marriage, capital and migration.

Gatty Jones stood at the meeting point of those worlds.

London beginnings and Welsh inheritance

William Halse Gatty Jones was born in London on 8 March 1825 and baptised at St Helen’s Church, Bishopsgate, on 1 June.

He was the eldest son of William Jones and Harriet Cartwright. His father was a successful London solicitor whose accumulated wealth eventually supported the development of Glandwr Hall and its estate in the Llyfnant Valley near Barmouth.

Although born and educated in London, Gatty belonged to a family increasingly invested in Welsh land and status. Glandwr represented more than a country residence. It gave visible form to wealth earned through the law and transformed a professional family into members of the provincial landed class.

Between 1834 and 1839 Gatty attended Merchant Taylors’ School. His subsequent training followed two parallel institutional paths.

In 1839 he was apprenticed to his maternal uncle, John William Cartwright, through the Worshipful Company of Skinners. Cartwright was a builder rather than a practising skinner, a reminder that membership of the City’s livery companies had long ceased to correspond neatly with occupation. Following his uncle’s death, Gatty completed the arrangement under his father’s supervision and became a Freeman of the City of London on 8 April 1846.

He was also formally apprenticed to his father as a solicitor in April 1841. The census taken that year places the teenage Gatty at Crosby Square in his father William’s household with Harriet and the rest of the family, giving a useful contemporary glimpse of the domestic setting from which his legal career emerged. Having completed his articles, he qualified in 1846 and entered the family practice at 7 Crosby Square, Bishopsgate. The firm became known as Jones, Blaxland and Son.

These were more than professional credentials. The law and the livery companies provided networks of trust, business and civic identity. They placed Gatty within the institutional culture of the City while the family estate connected him with Merionethshire. He belonged fully to neither world alone.

The making of an heir

Gatty’s twenty-first birthday was celebrated in March 1846 with extraordinary public ceremony around Barmouth and Dolgellau.

Oatmeal was distributed to poor families. Workers and tenants associated with Glandwr were provided with a substantial meal and ale. Local gentry and dignitaries gathered at the Corsygedol Arms in Barmouth. The celebrations concluded with fireworks, reportedly a novelty in both Barmouth and Dolgellau.

Such events were never merely private birthday parties. They announced the arrival of an heir and affirmed the expected relationship between a landed family, its tenants and the surrounding community. Food, drink and spectacle converted inheritance into public legitimacy.

Yet Gatty did not immediately retreat into the life of a country gentleman. He remained in London and pursued the law.

On 28 August 1849 he married Anne Laura Jones at Llanaber Church. Laura was the niece and adopted daughter of the Reverend John Jones of Borthwnog, a clergyman, landowner and patron of Welsh literary culture. Orphaned when young, she had been raised at Borthwnog by her uncle and his wife, Margaret.

The monumental inscriptions at St Mary’s Church, Dolgellau, add useful context to this inheritance. They identify the Reverend John Jones as the eldest surviving son of Thomas Jones, formerly of Dolgellau and Ynysfaig, and his wife Lowry. A separate inscription commemorates Griffith Jones of Bryntirion, born in 1777 and died in 1834, together with his wife Anne and their daughter Laura. These memorials do not by themselves resolve every relationship within the extended family, but they confirm the closely connected Dolgellau kinship from which the Borthwnog estate and Anne Laura’s position emerged.

The marriage brought together two locally prominent families. It also strengthened Gatty’s future position in Merionethshire. Through Laura, the Borthwnog estate would eventually pass into their household. Before that inheritance could shape his life, however, Gatty made a far more hazardous decision. He left Britain for Australia.

Melbourne in the gold-rush years

Gatty withdrew from his father’s legal partnership at the end of 1852. Early in the following year, he sailed for Melbourne, arriving on 31 May 1853.

His precise motive has not been recorded. It is reasonable to see professional opportunity as part of it. The discovery of gold had transformed Victoria with remarkable speed. Migrants arrived from Britain, Europe, North America and China. Settlements expanded, property values shifted and commercial disputes multiplied.

The colony required lawyers. Miners needed claims defended. Merchants required contracts and debt recovery. Land purchases, partnerships, insolvencies and speculation created a lucrative field for men able to navigate English legal forms within rapidly changing colonial conditions.

Gatty was admitted to practise before the Supreme Court of Victoria in August 1854, but his colonial legal career had begun even earlier. Shortly after arriving in Melbourne he worked for Thomas Turner à Beckett, one of the colony’s established legal figures, before practising in partnerships recorded as Jones and Toynbee by about 1854 and Jones and Plummer by about 1860. The Victoria Government Gazette places Jones and Toynbee at 87 Little Collins Street acting as solicitors for proposed company legislation, while later directories place Jones and Plummer at 36 Collins Street. Gatty therefore entered not merely private legal practice but the rapidly expanding world of colonial companies, property and commercial development. He also became sufficiently prosperous to invest in land, acquiring two plots at St Kilda in November 1856 and further property in the Cranbourne area two years later.

His Australian success should not be exaggerated into an undocumented gold-rush fortune. There is no evidence that he personally discovered gold or became one of the colony’s great magnates. His opportunity lay in the professional economy created around the goldfields.

The surviving evidence now suggests that the relationship was closer than that distinction once implied. Heritage Victoria’s historical mining chronology, drawing upon the Mining Surveyors’ Reports for the St Andrews Division, recorded in October 1861 that the claim of “Mr Gatty Jones & Co.” at One Tree Hill was yielding quartz of above-average richness. This does not establish that Gatty personally worked underground or laboured as a digger, but it does demonstrate a direct commercial interest in a productive quartz-mining claim. His legal and administrative career therefore existed alongside investment in the industry itself. He served the society that gold was building.

Law, friendship and professional identity

The legal profession in early colonial Melbourne lacked some of the institutional structures familiar to English practitioners. Solicitors worked within a society expanding faster than its professional conventions could develop, and Gatty’s work increasingly overlapped with the colony’s larger commercial ambitions. In 1862 he was named to the provisional committee formed to promote the British and Australian Steam Navigation Company, a proposed undertaking intended to improve steam communication while combining immigration and postal services. The scheme placed him alongside leading colonial businessmen and public figures and illustrates how a solicitor could become part of the machinery through which transport, migration and investment were organised.

Gatty became part of a small circle of lawyers known as the Bread and Cheese Club. This should not be confused with the better-known Melbourne literary society of the same name founded in 1938. The earlier club was a convivial association of solicitors who met to dine and socialise, with legal discussion reportedly discouraged during their meals.

Its informality mattered. Professional communities are often created socially before they are defined constitutionally. Men who ate together also learned whom they could trust, refer business to and support in institutional initiatives.

In March 1859, twenty-six Melbourne solicitors established the Law Institute of Victoria. Evidence preserved in histories of the profession places Gatty among its founders. The Institute was initially closer to a professional and social association than the powerful regulatory body it later became, but its establishment signalled a desire to give solicitors a collective identity and strengthen standards within the colony.

The Encyclopedia of Melbourne notes that the Institute began in 1859 as a relatively modest organisation for city solicitors before acquiring greater influence over legislation and professional conduct during the later nineteenth century.

Gatty therefore participated in the early formation of an institution that continues to represent Victoria’s legal profession.

The law of the goldfields

His legal standing also brought him into the administration of mining. In February 1860 Gatty was appointed to the Castlemaine Mining Board. Castlemaine had become one of the great centres of the Victorian gold rush, attracting thousands of miners and generating fierce disputes over access, ownership and regulation.

Mining boards formed part of the colonial government’s attempt to replace improvised goldfield administration with more coherent local regulation. Their responsibilities included the interpretation of mining rules and the recognition of rights within the gold districts.

Gatty’s appointment reflected the practical value of his legal experience. The surviving by-laws published in the Victoria Government Gazette show that his role was not merely honorary. When the Castlemaine Mining Board’s regulations were formally recorded in 1860, Gatty qualified his concurrence by excepting a number of individual provisions and schedules. The detail is revealing. He was reading the rules closely enough to withhold agreement from particular clauses concerning the administration of mining rights and land, evidence of a lawyer actively scrutinising the legal framework of the goldfields rather than simply lending his name to it.

His connection with gold did not end when he left Australia. In 1865 he patented a machine intended to crush and wash gold-bearing quartz and other minerals. The invention suggests that his interest extended beyond legal administration into the technical problems of mineral extraction.

It may also have had relevance closer to home. Gold had been discovered near Dolgellau, and land later associated with the Glandwr estate included the Clogau mining district. Australia and Merioneth were not as economically distant as they appeared.

Cricket and colonial society

Gatty’s public life extended beyond law and mining. A keen cricketer since his school days, Gatty played for amateur teams in Victoria and was elected to the committee of the Melbourne Cricket Club in September 1857. His connection was more substantial than committee membership alone. The Melbourne Cricket Club’s historical journal identifies W. H. Gatty Jones as the MCC’s solicitor and records him acting as legal adviser to the proposed All England and Australian Cricket Association during the attempts to bring an English professional eleven to Australia. The share-based scheme itself failed and should not be confused with the successful English tour of 1861–62, but Gatty was nevertheless involved in one of the serious preliminary efforts to turn colonial enthusiasm for cricket into an organised international enterprise.

Cricket was still developing its colonial institutions, but the Jones household’s involvement in Melbourne society extended beyond Gatty’s clubs and committees. Laura emerges from the surviving evidence as a participant in public life in her own right. In 1861 she was assisting newly arrived British women seeking work as daily governesses, and when the Female Middle Class Emigration Society was established in 1862, Mrs Gatty Jones was named among its Melbourne correspondents. The Society, associated with Maria Rye and other campaigners for women’s employment, sought to help educated middle-class women emigrate to places where respectable work might be available. Laura’s role placed her within a network concerned with migration, female employment and the practical reception of women arriving in the colonies.

Gatty also became prominent within Melbourne’s Welsh community and helped organise celebrations for St David’s Day. These gatherings allowed emigrants to preserve a collective identity through speeches, music, dining and national remembrance.

His involvement is important because Gatty’s personal relationship with Welsh culture was complex. He came from a Welsh family and maintained strong ties to Merionethshire, yet the 1891 census later recorded him as speaking English but not Welsh.

Welsh identity did not depend upon linguistic fluency alone. For some members of the nineteenth-century professional diaspora, Wales operated through ancestry, family property, patronage and public affiliation rather than everyday use of the language. Gatty could celebrate Wales in Melbourne while remaining culturally shaped by London.

Election to the Victorian Parliament

In 1859 Gatty entered electoral politics. He initially stood for the rural constituency of Evelyn after the resignation of its member, John King. Gatty opposed payment for members of the Assembly, supported protection for emerging colonial industries and objected to government financial support for religion.

He lost that first contest to William Bell, receiving 132 votes against Bell’s 209. When Bell subsequently resigned, Gatty stood again and won the March 1860 by-election decisively, defeating George Weir by 168 votes to 18.

He was returned again at the general election of August 1861, receiving 299 votes against two opponents. The modern Parliament of Victoria records William Halse Gatty Jones as the member for Evelyn from 1860 until 1863.

He sat as an Independent. This was not unusual in a colonial political culture where parliamentary groupings remained fluid and personal position could matter more than permanent party allegiance.

His support for protective tariffs reflected the argument that Victoria’s young industries required defence against established overseas competition. His opposition to state aid for religion was compatible with emerging colonial support for a state independent of denominational privilege.

It should not, however, be attributed casually to Welsh Nonconformity. Gatty’s family was associated with the established Anglican Church. His wife had been raised by an Anglican clergyman, and Gatty later donated land for an Anglican mission church at Bontddu. His position appears to have concerned the constitutional financing of religion rather than hostility towards Anglican belief.

His parliamentary committee service included work relating to elections and qualifications, pensions, the Crown Solicitor’s Office and amendments to Melbourne’s railway legislation. These appointments placed him within the practical business of colonial government rather than merely its speeches and divisions.

The accident

On 19 August 1861, while campaigning for re-election, Gatty was thrown from his carriage.

The injuries were severe. His tibia sustained a compound fracture, his fibula was broken and his ankle dislocated. Contemporary medicine offered limited protection against infection, while amputation remained a common response to catastrophic limb injuries.

Doctors initially considered removing his leg. According to later accounts, his condition was too weak for the operation, so the bones were reset instead. The leg was saved.

Against medical advice, Gatty returned to the Legislative Assembly at the end of October. He entered on crutches, and the assembled members rose to applaud him. By the end of the year, he had also resumed legal work.

The episode was subsequently remembered as evidence of determination. It may also have carried a permanent cost. Later in life, Gatty employed a full-time nurse, although the available evidence does not prove that this was a direct consequence of the Australian injuries.

Victorian admiration for endurance could disguise prolonged pain. The public story was one of courage and return. The private physical consequences are harder to recover.

Departure from Australia

Gatty left Melbourne aboard the Moravia on 2 April 1863. At a farewell dinner in the Evelyn constituency, he explained that he intended to visit his father.

Whatever his longer intentions had been, he never returned. His Victorian landholdings were sold and his parliamentary career ended.

His departure should not be described too neatly as retirement following a decade of fortune-making. He was only thirty-eight and continued practising law in Britain for another thirty years. Family responsibilities, property and opportunity all drew him back.

The Australian period had nevertheless transformed him. He returned not simply as the son of a London solicitor, but as a former colonial parliamentarian with experience of goldfield administration, institutional development and public office.

Return to the City

Back in London, Gatty established his own practice rather than rejoining his father’s firm.

In 1867 the Lord Chancellor appointed him a Commissioner for taking oaths in Chancery. His Australian legal identity also survived his return. The Victorian parliamentary biographical register records that he acted in London as a Commissioner of Affidavits for the Supreme Courts of Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. This gave his Crosby Square practice a continuing role in colonial legal business across several Australian jurisdictions rather than Victoria alone.

When his father retired in 1870, Gatty occupied 7 Crosby Square as his principal office and London residence. His eldest surviving son, William Wilding Jones, qualified as a solicitor and joined him in the partnership of W. H. Gatty Jones and Son.

Gatty’s standing within the City also increased. He served as Master of the Worshipful Company of Skinners and, through that office, participated in the governance of Tonbridge School. In 1870 and 1871 he served as one of the under-sheriffs of London and appeared in his own carriage during the Lord Mayor’s procession.

These offices did not make him one of the rulers of the City, but they placed him within its established civic order. The colonial lawyer had returned to the very institutions in which his professional identity had begun. He continued practising until early 1893.

Borthwnog and Glandwr

Anne Laura’s inheritance had already given Gatty a substantial landed interest in Merionethshire.

Following the death of her adoptive mother, Margaret Jones, in 1856, the Borthwnog estate, amounting to almost 1,500 acres, passed into Laura and Gatty’s household. Borthwnog Hall itself was let rather than used as their principal residence. Gatty eventually sold the house at auction in June 1879, although much of the surrounding estate remained under his ownership.

When his father died in 1882, Gatty inherited Glandwr. The remaining Borthwnog lands were joined administratively with the Glandwr estate, producing a holding of slightly more than 3,000 acres at its greatest extent.

Its properties stretched through the country between Barmouth and Bontddu, with further land around Dolgellau and Aberangell.

Ownership on this scale made Gatty a substantial landowner, but not one insulated from economic pressure. Much of upland Merioneth consisted of relatively poor agricultural land worked by tenants whose security depended upon livestock prices, rents and weather. The Great Agricultural Depression placed sustained pressure upon both farmers and estates during the final decades of the century. The apparent scale of an estate could therefore conceal considerable financial fragility.

The country gentleman

Gatty moved to Glandwr Hall after his father’s death, although he continued his London legal work, and surviving records show that the two worlds were directly connected. Bangor University’s Nanney Williams Collection identifies W. Gatty Jones of 7 Crosby Square as solicitor to the Nannau Estate, preserving correspondence with members of the Vaughan family, settlement papers and other estate business. Crosby Square therefore functioned not simply as a metropolitan office separate from his Welsh landed life, but as a professional bridge into the legal affairs of Merionethshire’s established estates.

In Merionethshire, he adopted many of the expected responsibilities of a Victorian landowner. He served as a Justice of the Peace in the Barmouth magistrates’ court and became a patron of the Merioneth Agricultural Society. The 1891 census gives one of the clearest surviving pictures of Glandwr in his later years. Gatty, aged sixty-six, described himself as a “Solicitor & Farmer”, while his unmarried daughter Evelyn was also at the house. Around them was a substantial working household of domestic and farm servants, including a cook, coachman, housemaids, dairy staff and agricultural servants. The return also recorded Gatty as English-speaking rather than Welsh-speaking. Glandwr was therefore not simply a retirement address but the centre of a functioning landed household in which professional identity, farming and domestic service still met.

He also renewed his association with cricket. He supported Barmouth Cricket Club and continued to play in local matches despite advancing age and the lasting memory of his Australian accident.

In 1888 he donated land for the construction of the mission church at Bontddu. The gift expressed a familiar form of landed paternalism, providing an institution for the local community while affirming the relationship between estate, Anglican Church and social authority.

Such acts were both charitable and hierarchical. The Victorian country gentleman was expected to support churches, agricultural organisations and public order. In return, the language of stewardship helped legitimise landed power.

Gatty’s authority in Merionethshire rested partly on inheritance, but also on the professional and public experience he brought back from London and Australia.

Nine children and a widening world

Gatty and Laura had nine children, and the surviving census returns allow the family to be followed through several very different stages of their lives. In 1851, at 10 Tower Street in South Hackney, Gatty was twenty-six and already described as an attorney and solicitor. Laura was twenty, and their first child, John Norris Jones, was only a month old. A nurse and a house servant completed the small household. Within a few months that domestic picture had been shattered. John Norris died at Borthwnog Hall on 23 September 1851, aged only seven months, and became the first member of this branch of the family to be buried at Llanaber.

Their second child, Margaret Elizabeth Jones, was born at Glandwr on 28 July 1852 and appears to have been the only one of Gatty’s children actually born there. She travelled with her parents to Australia but died in Melbourne on 17 February 1857, aged four. A third child, William Wilding Jones, born at Melbourne on 31 July 1855, survived, but the next son, Herbert Clive Jones, born there on 31 July 1857, died in Melbourne on 25 November 1858 at only sixteen months. Three of the first four children were therefore dead before the family had completed its Australian years. Their deaths are a reminder that the mobility made possible by professional success did not protect Victorian families from the ordinary dangers of infancy and childhood.

By the 1871 census the family had been back in Britain for several years and was living at Streatham. Gatty, aged forty-six, was again recorded as a solicitor, with Laura and five of their surviving children under the same roof. William Wilding, fifteen, and Gatty Wynne, eleven, were both scholars. Arthur Howel was four, Evelyn Annie three, and Pauline Harriet Emma only ten months old. Four female servants were also living in the household. The contrast with the young couple at Tower Street twenty years earlier is striking. Gatty and Laura had moved from an early professional household, through Melbourne and colonial politics, back into the prosperous domestic world of the Victorian professional middle and upper-middle classes.

William Wilding Jones became the child who most directly continued his father’s professional and landed life. He qualified as a solicitor in 1876 and immediately joined Gatty in W. H. Gatty Jones & Son. His interests were broader than the law. As a young man he wrote criticism, played the piano at musical gatherings around Barmouth and Bontddu, and in 1877 published a five-act comedy, Love Me Little, Love Me Long. By 1881 he was twenty-five, still living with his parents at Streatham and recorded independently as a solicitor. After Gatty’s retirement he continued the family practice from Granville House in the Strand, and the Nanney Williams Collection at Bangor shows that the connection with one of Merionethshire’s great landed estates also passed from father to son: Wilding appears repeatedly in the surviving papers as solicitor to the Nannau Estate.

Wilding inherited Glandwr in 1897, but he inherited its problems as well as its status. Agricultural depression and the cost of maintaining the estate forced him to sell substantial areas of land and eventually to let Glandwr Hall itself. His own children carried the family story into the twentieth century, including Hugh Wynn Wilding-Jones, the intended heir who was killed in 1918 during the First World War. The history of Glandwr after Gatty was therefore shaped as much by contraction and loss as by inheritance.

Gatty Wynne Jones followed an altogether different path. Born in Melbourne on 14 August 1859, he spent part of his childhood in Britain and attended Tonbridge School for a time. His family hoped that he would enter medicine, and he was sent to Paris to study surgery, but music interested him far more. In March 1892 he left for the United States and began the career that eventually defined him. Contemporary American musical publications place him teaching banjo at the Conservatory of Music in Jacksonville, Illinois, and show that he was not merely a performer but a published teacher and composer. His Golden Gate Waltz was commercially issued for solo banjo, while his Progressive Studies for the Mandolin combined scales, exercises and original compositions.

He married May Blanche Taylor in Jacksonville on 27 January 1893 and later lived in Illinois, California and Utah. By the early twentieth century he had established the Jones College of Music, and contemporary directories identify him as its director. A later issue of The Cadenza recorded that, after Gatty Wynne’s death, the business was purchased and reorganised as the Angelus School of Music. This confirms that the Jones College of Music was not simply a grand name attached to private tuition but a functioning musical school founded by Gatty Wynne himself. He died at Salt Lake City on 1 May 1913, aged fifty-three, after a paralytic stroke. His life took the family’s Australian beginning into an entirely different American cultural world.

Arthur Howel Jones, born in London on 28 June 1866, is more difficult to reconstruct. The surviving evidence shows that he entered the Merchant Navy and worked as a ship’s purser, the officer responsible for money, accounts and passengers’ financial affairs aboard ship. He later married an American woman called Aurilla and appears to have had no children. He died in California on 30 March 1902, aged thirty-five. Further searches under variations of his name have so far failed to produce records secure enough to extend the story without risking confusion with other men called Arthur Jones.

Evelyn Annie Jones was born in London on 5 July 1867 and was given the name of the Victorian parliamentary constituency her father had represented. The 1871 and 1881 censuses place her within the Streatham household, first as a small child and later as a schoolgirl. She married Charles Braby in London on 1 June 1901. Braby worked for the large metal-manufacturing concern Frederick Braby & Co., which operated works and offices across Britain, and he became manager of its London factory. The couple lived at Portman Mansions in Marylebone. Evelyn died on 7 April 1923 while staying at the Hotel Eden at Montreux, Switzerland. Her estate was valued at £11,401, and her will is revealing of both wealth and personal priorities: she left substantial sums to animal charities, divided much of the remainder among nieces and nephews, and provided her younger brother Herbert Wynne Jones with an allowance of £1 a week for life.

Pauline Harriet Emma Jones, born in London on 7 May 1870, experienced the most publicly painful of the children’s adult lives. In the late 1880s she became involved with Edward Davies, a doctor and the son of a prosperous Barmouth hotel family, while he was still married. Their daughter Pauline Annie Evelyn Davies was born in December 1889, and after Edward’s first wife obtained a divorce, Pauline and Edward married at Machynlleth in March 1891. Two further children followed, Cicely Margaret and Thomas Robert. The marriage soon became violent and destructive. Court evidence described physical assaults, threats with a knife, the selling of Pauline’s possessions and Edward’s infidelity. In September 1892 Pauline fled one confrontation and found refuge with her father at Glandwr. She eventually secured a divorce in February 1897.

The episode is better understood as part of the social history of marriage and divorce than as family scandal. Divorce remained expensive, public and socially damaging, especially for women, and Pauline’s experience shows the limits of wealth and status as forms of protection. After Gatty’s death she lived in London and described herself as a widow. In 1923 she married the stockbroker Arnold John Lindsay Simpson, and the couple later lived in Paris before the outbreak of the Second World War brought her back to Britain. She died in London on 1 April 1941. One of her sons, Thomas Robert Davies, later went to Australia and served with the Australian Imperial Force, an unexpected echo of his grandfather’s own connection with the colony.

The youngest child, Herbert Wynne Jones, was born at Streatham on 24 February 1873. His adult life was restless. Educated away from home, he briefly held a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, later served as a private in the Wiltshire Regiment and was posted to Karachi before purchasing his discharge in 1897. He joined the Pembrokeshire Imperial Yeomanry during the South African War and subsequently emigrated to Canada. Later research based on surviving military and migration records places his departure for Canada in 1908, rather earlier than previously believed, and shows that when he attested for the Canadian Expeditionary Force in November 1914 he described himself as a rancher. He served as a captain during the First World War and later returned to Britain, where by 1921 he was describing himself as a self-employed fruit and poultry farmer.

Herbert’s personal life was equally unsettled. He married Kathleen Edith Maria James in 1900 and had a daughter, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1916. He married again the following year and eventually settled in Twickenham. He died on 8 March 1955, aged eighty-two. Some details preserved in older family research, including the precise name of his daughter and the claim that he was wounded at Loos in 1915, still require direct confirmation from primary records and are therefore best treated cautiously rather than repeated as settled fact.

Taken together, the children make Gatty’s life look less like a single extraordinary journey and more like the beginning of a family pattern. One son continued the law and the Glandwr inheritance, another became a professional musician and music-school founder in the United States, another entered the Merchant Navy, while the younger generation spread into Britain, Canada, continental Europe and Australia. The transnational world through which Gatty had moved did not end when he left Melbourne. It became the world inherited by his children.

Laura died at Guy’s Hospital in London on 15 August 1892 after a period of ill health. Her body was returned by train to Barmouth, and she was buried at Llanaber four days later. Gatty survived her by five years.

The will: heirlooms, property and the next generation

Gatty signed his final will on 29 December 1892, only a few months after Laura’s death. He revoked earlier testamentary arrangements but expressly confirmed the marriage settlement made with his late wife, Anne Laura Jones. The document is particularly valuable because it shows how he intended the family’s property to pass after him and how clearly he distinguished between the dynastic inheritance of Glandwr and provision for his younger children.

William Wilding Jones, as the eldest surviving son and heir, occupied a special position. Gatty left him the plate that had formerly belonged to his own father, William Jones, for life, with remainder to the person who should ultimately become William Jones’s right heir. The will states that these objects were to be transmitted as heirlooms. Wilding therefore inherited more than land. He was being entrusted with objects that represented continuity between three generations of the family. This helps to explain why he was treated differently from his brothers and sisters elsewhere in the will: the Glandwr succession and the family heirlooms were intended to remain attached to the senior line.

The younger children were provided for through other property. Gatty owned five freehold houses at Crosby Buildings. While an existing lease remained in force, the rents were to be divided equally between Gatty Wynne Jones, Arthur Howel Jones, Herbert Wynne Jones, Evelyn Annie Jones and Pauline Harriet Emma Davies. When that arrangement ended, the houses themselves were to pass separately: No. 1 to Gatty Wynne, No. 2 to Evelyn, No. 3 to Arthur, No. 4 to Pauline and No. 5 to Herbert. The provision is important evidence that the family’s London property interests continued alongside the Welsh estate long after Gatty had settled at Glandwr.

His personal possessions were divided with equal care. Gatty Wynne received the gold watch and chain that his father normally wore. Herbert Wynne was left the remainder of the jewellery together with a breech-loading gun. Evelyn and Pauline were to divide between them the furniture, linen, china, plate, books, pictures, prints, musical instruments, guns, fishing tackle, horses, carriages, harness, stable furniture, farm stock, tools, wines and household stores belonging to Gatty at his death, with Evelyn having first choice where articles were of equal value. The catalogue is unusually evocative. It gives a glimpse of the material world of Glandwr, from drawing-room possessions and books to sporting equipment, horses and the working contents of the farm.

The will also contains smaller bequests that reveal personal relationships largely invisible elsewhere. Gatty left twenty-five guineas to his godson Gatty Douglas Munns, £50 to his former nurse Rosetta Rose of Barmouth, and twenty guineas each to Ella Ripley, Lucy Ripley and Julia Blanche Ripley, daughters of his old friend John Anthony Ripley of Surbiton, so that they might purchase a small token in remembrance of him. His executors, Frederick George Munns and Robert Hogarth Nicholson, were each left fifty guineas for their trouble.

The financial provisions for the children were carefully structured. Each child other than William Wilding was to receive an annuity of £50 under the terms laid down in the will, while the residue was ultimately divided among the younger children rather than the heir. Particularly significant was Gatty’s declaration that every annuity and share given to a daughter was to be for her “sole and separate use”. Such clauses were familiar in Victorian settlements, but the timing is striking. Pauline’s marriage to Edward Davies had already become violent and unstable, and she had sought refuge at Glandwr only a few months before the will was signed. It would be unsafe to claim that her circumstances alone caused the wording, but the effect was clear: property intended for Pauline and Evelyn was protected for their own use rather than simply passing under a husband’s control.

There is also an unusually relevant provision concerning minerals. Gatty empowered his trustees to sell or lease land while reserving, or separately disposing of, mines, minerals, coal, quarries, stone, clay, sand and other substances, together with rights of access for working and removing them. Some of this was standard conveyancing language, and it does not prove that every part of Glandwr possessed commercially valuable deposits. In Gatty’s case, however, the wording has particular resonance. His life had included a commercial quartz-mining interest in Victoria, service on the Castlemaine Mining Board and a patent connected with the treatment of mineral-bearing quartz. His trustees were also permitted to invest in securities in Britain, India and other British colonies and dependencies, a reminder that the legal and financial world of his will remained much wider than Merionethshire.

The will therefore clarifies the logic of Gatty’s succession. William Wilding was to carry the Glandwr inheritance, the family heirlooms and the senior line, while the younger children were provided for through London property, personal possessions, annuities and the residuary estate. It was an attempt to preserve a landed family identity without leaving the other children entirely dependent upon the heir. In that sense, the document reveals Gatty not simply disposing of property but consciously arranging how the family he had carried between London, Melbourne and Merionethshire should continue after him.

Death and a diminished inheritance

William Halse Gatty Jones died at Glandwr Hall on 16 September 1897 after suffering a severe stroke. He was seventy-two.

His funeral took place at Llanaber on 22 September. He was the last member of this branch of the family to be buried in the family plot there.

The probate record preserves the final legal summary with unusual precision. It described him as “William Halse Gatty of Glandwr near Dolgelly Merionethshire formerly solicitor”, recorded his death on 16 September 1897, and noted that probate was granted in London on 14 December to Frederick George Munns and Robert Hogarth Nicholson, gentlemen. The probate copy gives the gross value of his personal estate as £3,927 15s. 3d. and the net value as £2,971 8s. 4d.

This was not poverty, but it was modest in relation to the apparent scale of his landholdings and earlier professional success. The reasons cannot be established with certainty. Agricultural depression, estate costs, family obligations and the expenses of maintaining property may all have contributed.

Land did not necessarily mean liquidity. A gentleman might possess thousands of acres while lacking the income required to sustain them comfortably.

The financially weakened estate passed to William Wilding Jones, who inherited not only the family’s position but the task of managing its vulnerabilities.

Between two worlds

Gatty Jones cannot be understood solely as an Australian politician, London solicitor or Welsh landowner. Each identity shaped the others.

His legal education gave him access to gold-rush Melbourne, but the surviving evidence shows that he did more than serve the economy created by gold. He advised mining interests, helped regulate the goldfields, invested directly in a quartz claim and later patented machinery for processing gold-bearing quartz. At the same time, company work, cricket administration and parliamentary service drew him into the institutional construction of colonial society. Returning to Britain, he carried those networks into a London practice that continued to serve Australian jurisdictions and Welsh estates, while family inheritance eventually allowed him to assume the position of a Merionethshire country gentleman.

Yet his life also reveals the limits of easy labels. He was Welsh by descent and landed connection, but apparently did not speak Welsh. He opposed state aid to religion in Victoria, but supported the Anglican presence at Bontddu. He occupied a large estate, but left a considerably smaller personal fortune than its acreage might suggest. He was celebrated for returning to Parliament after a devastating accident, while the longer physical consequences remain uncertain.

This complexity is precisely what makes him historically valuable. The rural families of Merionethshire were not sealed within their valleys. Their children entered London professions, crossed oceans, invested in colonial cities and participated in imperial institutions. Money, ideas and experience travelled back with them.

Gatty’s life moved from Bishopsgate to Melbourne, from the Castlemaine goldfields to the Victorian Parliament, and eventually to Glandwr Hall. His journey was exceptional, but it belonged to a wider nineteenth-century world in which Welsh family identity could remain powerful across enormous distances.

He returned to the hills of Merioneth not as a man retreating from history, but as someone carrying the experience of a rapidly changing world back into the landscape of his family.

Related Books

William Jones of Glandwr Hall: Law, Authority, and the Making of a Victorian Life
For the life of Gatty’s father and the creation of the legal, civic and landed world he inherited.
Kindle · Paperback

Old Llyfnant Valley Farming Families
For the wider Jones of Glandwr family history and its Merionethshire setting across several generations.
Kindle · Paperback

Related Essays

Explore more family and Glandwr history

Continue with the Jones Family of Glandwr Hall, or browse Family History & Genealogy.

Receive new historical essays by email

For new essays on Welsh history, biography, genealogy and rural community life, subscribe on the homepage.

Sources and Further Reading

Monumental inscriptions at St Mary’s Church, Dolgellau, transcribed in family research papers, for Thomas and Lowry Jones, the Reverend John Jones, Griffith and Anne Jones of Bryntirion, and Laura, widow of Thomas Rogers.
Will of William Halse Gatty Jones, signed 29 December 1892 and proved 14 December 1897, for the heirloom provisions affecting William Wilding Jones, the five Crosby Buildings, personal bequests, annuities, protections for daughters, mineral-rights clauses, executors and residuary arrangements.
1841, 1851, 1871, 1881 and 1891 census returns for the Jones households at Crosby Square, Tower Street, Streatham and Glandwr, including the original returns supplied for this research.
Probate copy and National Probate Calendar, 1897, for William Halse Gatty Jones of Glandwr, recording probate on 14 December 1897 to Frederick George Munns and Robert Hogarth Nicholson, with gross personal estate of £3,927 15s. 3d. and net personal estate of £2,971 8s. 4d.
Parliament of Victoria, “William Halse Gatty Jones”, for his representation of Evelyn and parliamentary committee service.
Victorian parliamentary biographical registers, including the Australian National University’s digitised biographical material, for Gatty’s legal partnerships, mining-company work, Law Institute service and later commissions for Australian courts.
Victoria Government Gazette, 1854, for Jones and Toynbee of 87 Little Collins Street and their company-law work; 1860 for the Castlemaine Mining Board by-laws and Gatty’s qualified concurrence; and 1863 for the writ issued following his resignation from Evelyn.
Sands & Kenny and Sands & McDougall Melbourne directories, 1850s–1860s, for Gatty’s legal offices and the partnerships of Jones and Toynbee and Jones and Plummer.
Heritage Victoria, historical mining chronology and Mining Surveyors’ Reports, for the October 1861 report that the claim of Mr Gatty Jones & Co. at One Tree Hill was yielding quartz of above-average richness.
Supreme Court of Victoria admission records, for Gatty’s admission to practise in August 1854.
Simon Smith, Solicitors and the Law Institute in Victoria, 1835–2019: Pathway to a Respected Profession (Law Institute of Victoria, 2019), together with Law Institute of Victoria institutional records.
Encyclopedia of Melbourne, “Law Institute of Victoria”, for the Institute’s formation and development.
Melbourne Cricket Club, The Yorker, Issue 46, Summer 2011–12, for Gatty’s position as MCC solicitor and legal adviser to the proposed All England and Australian Cricket Association.
Melbourne Cricket Club minutes and committee records, particularly those for 1857, for his election to the club committee and wider involvement in colonial cricket.
English Woman’s Journal, April 1862, for evidence of Anne Laura Gatty Jones assisting women seeking employment as daily governesses in Melbourne.
Female Middle Class Emigration Society, early annual reports and archival descriptions, for Mrs Gatty Jones among the Society’s Melbourne correspondents and for the organisation’s work assisting educated female emigrants.
New Zealander, 7 August 1862, reporting the proposed British and Australian Steam Navigation Company and naming Gatty Jones to its provisional committee.
National Library of Australia, Trove, contemporary Victorian newspapers and advertisements, for Gatty’s legal work, transport and company schemes, election campaigns, accident, parliamentary return, Welsh community activities and departure from Victoria.
Bangor University Archives, Nanney Williams Collection, including settlement papers and correspondence identifying W. Gatty Jones of 7 Crosby Square as solicitor to the Nannau Estate and later records identifying William Wilding Jones as solicitor to the estate.
William Wilding Jones, Love Me Little, Love Me Long: A Comedy in Five Acts (J. Welch, 1877), for his documented literary work.
S. S. Stewart banjo catalogues and contemporary American musical periodicals, for Gatty Wynne Jones’s Golden Gate Waltz, Progressive Studies for the Mandolin and his professional teaching career.
Ogden city directories, 1911 and 1912, for the Jones College of Music and Gatty Wynne Jones as director.
The Cadenza, 1915, for the later purchase and reorganisation of the Jones College of Music as the Angelus School of Music following Gatty Wynne Jones’s death.
Military, migration and census records relating to Herbert Wynne Jones, including his British Army and Imperial Yeomanry service, Canadian migration and Canadian Expeditionary Force attestation, used with caution where the surviving record remains incomplete.
Divorce court records and census material relating to Pauline Harriet Emma Jones and Edward Davies, for the history of their marriage, separation and divorce.
Australian Imperial Force records and related indexes for Thomas Robert Davies, grandson of Gatty Jones, for his later Australian military connection.
The London Gazette, 26 April 1887, for the later practice of W. H. Gatty Jones and Son at 7 Crosby Square.
Merchant Taylors’ School and Tonbridge School registers, for the education of Gatty Jones and members of the next generation.
Worshipful Company of Skinners apprenticeship, freedom and company records, for Gatty’s apprenticeship, admission to the freedom of the City and later service as Master.
British and Australian land records relating to St Kilda, Cranbourne, Borthwnog and Glandwr, together with parish registers, civil registration and wills relating to the wider Jones family.
Contemporary Merionethshire newspapers, for Gatty’s magistracy, agricultural interests, cricket, support for Bontddu Mission Church, the deaths and funerals of family members and the later history of the Glandwr estate.
Antony David Davies, Old Llyfnant Valley Farming Families, especially the Jones of Glandwr chapters, for the family reconstruction, children and descendants used as the foundation for this expanded account.

William Halse Gatty Jones (1825–1897): From Gold-Rush Melbourne to the Hills of Merioneth