William Stillwell, Storekeeper of Hackham

William Stillwell came to Hackham from Haslemere, a market town tucked into the south-western corner of Surrey, and he carried the name of that place with him for the rest of his life. The house he and his wife Rhoda eventually settled in on Penneys Hill Road they called Haselmere, after the town he had left behind; and for the better part of thirty years he kept the district in flour, tea and sugar — first from a rented cottage at the edge of the township, later from a shop of his own, and always from the seat of a horse-drawn van that carried his trade out to the farms too far from the road to come in for it.

He was not the first of his name in the southern districts. A generation earlier another William Stillwell, born in Hampshire and out from England since about 1849, had farmed in the hills at Baker's Gully and then Kangarilla, where he died in 1881 at the age of sixty-five; his death notice asked the Hampshire papers to copy it. Haslemere sits in the very corner of Surrey that runs up against Hampshire, and two men of one name out of one small piece of England, settling within a few miles of each other in the southern country, are hard to put down to coincidence — the elder was very likely father or uncle to the younger. No record yet found sets the link out plainly, and the dates sit awkwardly if the storekeeper really did come out from Haslemere as a grown man; but the shared origin is too close to ignore.

Into a founding family

He had married into one of Hackham's founding families. Rhoda Hutchinson was born above the township in 1864, the eldest of the eleven children of William Palmer Hutchinson and Mary Ann Middleton, who farmed sheep and wheat and carted wood from a place they called Underwood in the hills behind Hackham. Her grandfather, also William Hutchinson, was a Manchester carpenter who had stepped off the Lysander in 1839, bought eighty acres in the Hundred of Noarlunga, and named his farm Ardwick after the corner of Manchester he had come from. When he sold most of that land in 1844 to Edward Castle — the man who would lay out the township of Hackham — it was Hutchinson, by local account, who helped Castle raise both Hackham House and the steam flour mill down at Noarlunga. To marry a Hutchinson was to marry into the making of the place.

Tainmoonda

From 1894 Stillwell leased a low stone cottage on the corner of Gates Road from William Holly, the son of the man who had built the Golden Pheasant Inn up the road, and ran his grocery there for the next ten years. The building was old enough to have begun, it was said, as a dugout with a cottage raised over it; in Stillwell's day it went by the name Tainmoonda, and the district later knew it as Holly's House. It still stands.

Haselmere

Around the turn of the century the Stillwells moved across to Penneys Hill Road and the house they named for William's birthplace. It was a trim limestone cottage with red brick dressings and a verandah across the front, a stone-lined rainwater tank set beneath one of the rooms to see the household through dry summers, and at the rear, facing the road, a corrugated-iron shop from which the business carried on. When his wife's parents gave up Underwood it was into the old Gates Road cottage that they moved, while William and Rhoda kept the trade going from the new premises.

The hawker's round

The shop alone did not make a living in country so thinly settled, and so Stillwell hawked. The hawker's round was the working half of a district storekeeper's trade: a van loaded with goods, a horse, and a long day's circuit out to the homesteads and back. The van was a travelling shop in itself, its shelves stacked from floor to roof with boxes of tinned goods, cornflour, soap and brushware, everything a farm kitchen might send for between trips to town.

It was on one of those journeys, the van by then heading in toward the city, that he came to grief. On the afternoon of Friday 3 October 1924 he was crossing the South Road where the Brighton railway line cut across it near Edwardstown when the down train caught him.

Mr. William Stillwell, of Hackham (60), a hawker, was driving over the intersection of the South road and the Brighton railway line at about 4.28 p.m. on October 3, when the train from Adelaide struck the rear of his van, smashing it to pieces and throwing the horse and the driver to the ground.

— Chronicle (Adelaide), 11 October 1924.

He was picked up unconscious and seen first by Dr J. W. Clayton at Edwardstown, who found concussion of the brain and abrasions, then taken to the Adelaide Hospital. He lingered there for a week and died on the Saturday night, 11 October 1924, aged sixty.

It was the kind of death the southern districts had learned to dread. Barely five years earlier Dr Clive Newland of Morphett Vale had ridden his motorbike into the path of a Willunga train at Sparrow's Crossing, on the Main South Road at Hackham itself, while answering an urgent call to Noarlunga — a man whose end is still recalled in the story of the Doctor's House. Stillwell met his far to the north of home, at a city crossing near Edwardstown, on the run in toward Adelaide; but it was the same hazard that took both men. The railways had brought the southern districts within easy reach of the city, and the open crossings they left behind took a steady toll of those who used the roads.

Rhoda's shop

Rhoda did not give up the shop. She was listed as storekeeper of Hackham from 1925 right through to 1948, keeping the Penneys Hill Road premises running for the better part of a quarter-century after her husband's death, and she lived on at Haselmere until she died in 1950. The house, its shop addition and the old cow sheds behind survive as a local heritage place, a private residence now; the name William Stillwell brought from Surrey is still attached to it.

Sources

• Kelly Dyer, High on the Hill: The People of St Philip & St James Church, Old Noarlunga (City of Onkaparinga Libraries, 2019) — Hutchinson and Holly family biographies; William Hutchinson's farm 'Ardwick' and his work for Edward Castle; Stillwell's lease of the Gates Road cottage 'Tainmoonda', 1894–1904
• City of Noarlunga Council, Heritage Study (1991), item HA20 — 'Holly's Houses', Gates Road, Hackham; the Stillwells' shop and Rhoda's parents in occupation
• City of Onkaparinga heritage register — Former Dwelling, Shop and Outbuilding, 'Haslemere', 15 Penneys Hill Road, Hackham, Heritage ID 5302; description of the cottage, rainwater tank and shop addition; Rhoda Stillwell storekeeper 1925–1948, died 1950
• Hutchinson Family — 150 Years, 1839–1989 — family history of the Hutchinsons of Hackham; source of the c.1900 photograph of Holly's House (Tainmoonda)
• South Australian Register, 1 December 1881 — death notice of the elder William Stillwell, of Kangarilla, late of Baker's Gully, aged 65, "a colonist of 32 years"; "Hampshire papers please copy" Trove
• Register (Adelaide), 4 October 1924 — 'Train Hit Hawker's Van'; the collision near Edwardstown Trove
• Chronicle (Adelaide), 11 October 1924 — 'Struck by a Train. Hawker Seriously Injured' Trove
• Advertiser (Adelaide), 13 October 1924 — 'Victim of Train Accident Dies' Trove
• Chronicle (Adelaide), 18 October 1924 — death of William Stillwell at the Adelaide Hospital; concussion of the brain; van struck at the South and Cross-roads crossing Trove