Daniel Brady founder of the Crosskeys Hotel down under
Daniel Brady was a wealthy Lavey man who went to Australia and founded a town and some hotels, as Jonathan Smyth tells us in his latest Times Past column...
Emigration decimated communities and was akin to a funeral when people boarded the train for the boat. It must have been a shocking scene to see your children depart in the old days when you knew that once the train disappeared over the hill, they were gone and that the chance of hugging let alone shaking their hand was a distant memory. But then I discovered Daniel Brady. Brady’s story was a bit different. Being a wealthy man, had chosen to emigrate rather than finding himself forced to do so.
The first time I saw Daniel Brady’s name, to tell you the truth, it was on a display board in an exhibition about migration that Mary Sullivan of Cavan Genealogy had researched and produced, called ‘Famine - ‘Breaking and Laveing the Country’. Brady was another person from our county’s unique diaspora and a great ambassador for his fellow country men and women and all they are able to do. Well anyway, as it goes, like everyone else that day, I had enjoyed Mary’s exhibition enormously, but it was not until some years later when Leslie McKeague text messaged me around Christmas 2023 to say he was holidaying in a place called Virginia, that I began to think over the Daniel Brady story again. Now, Leslie did not happen to be in his home county that Christmas. Instead, he was on his travels through another Virginia; an Australian town called Virginia, to be exact.
This particular town is situated in an outlying rural district of Adelaide and was founded by Daniel Brady who following almost five months on the high seas came to Australia in November 1840 with his wife Rose Rudden Brady and their six children. They arrived on a boat named the Diadem. Described as a wealthy settler, Daniel obtained a land grant of 100 acres midway between Dry Creek and the Little Para River in the Autumn of 1848. He set aside some of the land for the establishment of Virginia Township which he named after Virginia town in his homeland county.
Brady had married Rose Rudden from Cavan in 1828. Their children were John, Michael, Peter, Thomas, Catherine, Bridget, Philip and Patrick. However, the marriage ended in 1854, and Rose separated on the grounds of cruelty, desertion and adultery and, in 1864, a divorce was granted. Daniel married Alice McCabe, a Clare lady, and the children from the second marriage were Hubert, Susan, Alice, Emma, Amy, Daniel and Lily.
In 1854, Brady built the Wheatsheaf Hotel which was the first of Virginia’s larger sized properties, erected before the authorities granted him permission to form a township. In the same area along the Lower North Road, he built the Crosskeys Hotel that served weary travellers heading north to Moonta and Salisbury who had to cross a swampy place known as the Glue Pot.
Cavan, a suburb of Adelaide, South Australia, was founded by a man, or men who were emigrants from Cavan. The two contenders are Daniel Brady and B. Gillick. Brady purchased land in the area and then opened the Crosskeys Hotel in 1849; while nearby Gillick opened his Cavan Arms Hotel in 1855. However, it is widely thought that the region took its name from the Cavan Arms Hotel, which Gillick licensed to another Cavan expatriate named R.B. Colley.
We may be forgiven for thinking that Australia was initially an Irish settlement, but we would be wrong. In fact, it was predominantly the English settlers who formed the first communities.
The information provided in Mary Sullivan’s exhibition added that Daniel Brady was born in 1797 at Lattagloghan, in the parish of Lavey. She recorded that as a relatively newcomer to Australia in 1847 that Daniel was ‘already sponsoring emigrants’ and ‘as well as land purchases’ that he ‘went to the goldfields.’ His legacy to the colony perhaps were the huge numbers of Irish he introduced to the colony, among whom were many of his own ‘relatives from County Cavan’. Daniel died on January 13, 1889.
Teetulpa Goldfields
Daniel Brady’s son Thomas seems to have had a twinkle of gold in his eyes when he set his sights on the rich mineral deposits of the Teetulpa goldfields on October 5, 1886. The exhibition noted that in less than a month after its discovery, the goldfield had ‘over two thousand diggers’. The most prosperous part of the gold territory was known as ‘Brady’s Gully’, named in honour of Thomas Brady. He had a rare and natural instinct to sniff out the gold, a trait the Australians say seemed common to the Irish. His father was a dab hand himself at locating gold during the Bendigo gold rush in Victoria and as a youngster Thomas picked up some tips from him.
At Teetulpa, Brady’s Gully became the stuff of folklore, being devoted to many hundreds of newspaper columns, it was the place for finding gold. When Thomas retired from mining he headed north to Lancelot where tilling the land formed the next chapter of his life. The Chronicle on March 5, 1904, reported his death, recalling the old residents of Peterborough’s memories of Thomas’s ‘kindly countenance’ and how every so often he headed on a prospecting tour for gold, silver and copper; the old bug for mining igniting in him every so often when dry seasons ruined his turnover on the land.
Thomas died in the company of his daughter Mrs Willis and the Chronicle said of him: ‘The late Mr Brady originally came from County Cavan, Ireland, and was a most enthusiastic supporter of his native land. His character as one of the most lovable. He was honest to the most scrupulous degree, charitable beyond his means, just to his neighbours, and ever willing to aid a good cause.’
They say that when he discovered Teetulpa, he was with his nephew Thomas Smith, and that the government paid him £1,000, half of which he gave to the nephew. Not only that, but he was in debt to creditors and to his credit he paid off all his outstanding bills with the amount that was left over.
His father, Daniel Brady, left Cavan for a new life, but it was his choice rather than a forced necessity. Never-the-less, it still must have been tough on the relatives. Thankfully, communication and travel systems have improved and yet the pain of family separation caused by emigration still hurts many a mother and father to this day.
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