My great grandfather, the publican

The treasures you find when you start sorting out the historical family photo collections.
 
This is the memorial card produced after my great grandfather, Benjamin Hale, died in 1897. He was born in 1839 in Woolwich, County of Kent, England. The extra shows him as a young man after he arrived in Australia.
 
At the age of 17 he emigrated to Australia on the ship “Light of the Age”. He was not accompanied by any members of his family. He arrived in Sydney on 4 October 1857. The Immigrant’s Shipping List states that he was Church of England, literate, a carpenter and that he had no relatives in the colony.
 
Benjamin married Martha McGann in 1861 in Bathurst NSW. He was 22 and Martha was 24. Martha had arrived in Australia from Roscommon in Ireland two years before Benjamin arrived. Over the next 20 years they had eleven children. Five of them died in infancy. Ten of the eleven children were born in Bathurst and one was born in Hill End when Benjamin and Martha owned a hotel there during the gold rush. The last born of the children was my grandmother, also Martha.
 
The hotel in Hill End, the ‘Star of Hope Hotel’, burned down like many hotels in Hill End because they were built of wood. They moved back to Bathurst where Benjamin held the hotel licence for ‘The Family Hotel’ in 1868 and 1869 and the ‘Crooked Billet’, Bathurst in 1870 and 1871. I still have a set of beautiful sherry glasses from one of those hotels.
 
Family folklore has it that Benjamin enjoyed perhaps a little too much the product he sold.