Scandalous Silver
This article first appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Antiques to Vintage Magazine. Written by Elizabeth Cheung and edited by Julie Carter.
This handsome set of four substantial Georgian sterling silver salt cellars c.1822 bears the crest of a dove with an olive branch. The elegant exterior belies an interesting possible Australian connection via the escapades of British nobility, as this crest is of the Whannell family, associated with the Buchanan clan.
The family itself is an entirely respectable one, founded by Peter Whannell I who was granted arms in 1778. However, how did these pieces make it from Britain to Australia? The answer might lie in his great-grandson, Peter Brunton Whannell, whose colourful life informs our tale.
His father, Peter Whannell, was by all accounts an upstanding man and served as Auditor General of India for much of his career. Meanwhile his son Peter Brunton Whannell seems to have spent much of his life caught up in the excitement of one gold rush after another.
He moved to Melbourne sometime in the 1850s; exactly when is unclear, but from newspapers accounts Whannell and his wife welcomed a daughter at 10 Victoria Parade in 1856 when he was working in Her Majesty’s customs.
In the same year Whannell left Australia in a hurry with the wife of another Melbournite, abandoning his own wife and family. He then made his way to British Columbia, where he embellished his CV by promoting himself from trooper to captain both in Australia and the East Indies Cavalry. He thus was appointed Justice of the Peace and Revenue Officer at Fort Yale. It was in this role that he helped spark McGowan’s War, a bloodless comedy of errors that initiated law and order in what was then the Canadian Wild West.
The Fraser River Gold Rush meant that Yale was front and center in the hubbub, as the sleepy town was swarmed by over 30,000 miners nearly overnight. Miners from around the world who had gone to California to seek their fortunes and been left wanting rushed north, and with them came a marked rise in criminal activity. As a magistrate in Fort Yale, Peter Brunton Whannell served the interests of the ‘Law and Order’ party. Despite their high-sounding name, their overzealousness soon proved deeply unpopular.
Ned McGowan, a notorious rascal, egged on both Whannell and the magistrate George Perrier of the neighboring town Hill’s Bar to assert their magisterial dignity. When a Hill’s Bar man drunkenly assaulted a Yale resident, Whannell placed the latter in ‘protective custody’. When a Hill’s Bar constable came to make inquiries and interrupted Whannell’s court, Whannell promptly arrested him as well. Perrier, incensed, then arrested Whannell with Ned McGowan’s ‘assistance’. One contemporary account by British Columbia’s first judge, Matthew Beanie, describes gaol conditions as such: ‘The gaol at Yale, which, being circumscribed in its limits, must when thus containing prosecutor, witnesses, and constable—everybody but the accused persons—have been rather inconveniently crowded.’
Humiliated, when he returned home Whannell penned a hysterical missive to Governor James Douglas claiming that Ned McGowan was planning an armed uprising to seize British Columbia for the U.S. "The town and district are in a state bordering on anarchy. My own and the lives of the citizens are in imminent peril ... An effective blow must at once be struck on the operations of these outlaws, else I tremble for the welfare of the colony."
As a result the Royal Engineers were sent in to unweave this tangled web. Matters blew over once the miners encountered military discipline, and both magistrates were dismissed from their posts. Whannell soon left for the U.S., but after a string of failed businesses returned to India where he spent the rest of his days. Passing away in 1878 in Tamil Nadu, India, it is unknown if Peter ever reunited with the wife he had abandoned in Australia, but these salt cellars might well be among the many things he left behind.
References:
Birth Announcement of Daughter to Esq. P.B. Whannell and Wife: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/7131475
Colourful Characters in Historic Yale. Historic Yale Museum, Yale, British Columbia.
https://www.communitystories.ca/v1/pm_v2.php?id=story_line&lg=English&fl=0&ex=00000517&sl=3982&pos=1&pf=1
British Columbia Historical Quarterly, UBC Library: https://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/pdfs/bchf/bchq_1957_1.pdf
McGowan's War, Donald J. Hauka, New Star Books, Vancouver (2000)