caricaturist, army officer(?) and remittance man(?), was, according to local legend, really Sir Thomas, son and heir of Sir James Urquhart, head of the Ross-shire branch of this ancient and proud Scottish clan, who had been exiled to Australia for marrying Mary Norrie, the local butcher’s daughter. (Modestly, he never used the title after inheriting it in 1875.) According to his death certificate, however, he was the son of Freeman and Lydia Urquhart. Said to have been commissioned captain after active service in the Crimean War, the only possible candidate listed in Burke is Thomas Bedford Urquhart (1842-91), a captain in the 72nd Highlanders and a younger son of the (untitled) Aberdeen branch of the Urquhart clan, and it is possible that his rank too was mythical.

By the late 1860s Thomas and Mary Urquhart were living at Cudgewa Station, near Corryong on the Upper Murray in Victoria, a run taken up in 1865 by Mary’s brother David and her stepfather Alexander McEwan. That Captain Urquhart was at least a notable eccentric is evidenced by the further story that throughout his life he received regular remittances from home which he hid in the Cudgewa 'feather-house’, the shed where poultry was plucked. (A large hoard of coins is supposed to have been discovered there after his death.) His hobby was drawing and he specialised in comical and good-natured caricatures of local residents, many of which were given to his victims and framed and hung on their walls. Thomas died in 1893, aged sixty-nine, Mary in 1917 aged ninety-three. Both were buried in the Cudgewa Cemetery.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011