Thomas Howell Laby, 1880-1946

Abstract Thomas Howell Laby was born on 3 May 1880, at Creswick, Victoria, Australia. Creswick is about nine miles north of Ballarat; it came into existence in 1842, in ‘the squatting era’, and entered its ‘gold era’ in 1852. In those early days it was one of the first twelve towns of Victoria, but to-day it is one of the small towns of the State. For such a small place it boasts a remarkable number of men of great distinction. An unusual amount of detail is readily accessible in two books by a Creswick man, J. A. Graham: The Creswick Grammar School (1940)—a school of which Laby wrote, ‘a most distinguished school created by a great schoolmaster’; and Early Creswick (1942). The school may well have accounted for the quality of the town; Laby, unfortunately, got no benefit of it. The analogy that springs to one’s mind, as one thinks of Laby’s rather amazing career, is that of Michael Faraday, if for back street London one substitutes small townships in the Australian ‘bush’. Not that Laby was of humble birth. His father, Thomas James Laby, was a leading citizen of Creswick and a prosperous flour-mill owner, who had been Mayor of the Borough in 1871. He was born in London, in 1825, and was of French extraction, his grandfather having (Laby understood) been ‘a silk merchant in Lyons’. It appears that he had in 1883 contemplated retiring, comfortably off, to the Channel Islands: this also would have meant good educational opportunities for his children (two daughters and the boy, who was the youngest child). ‘Unfortunately’ (Laby’s notes say), ‘he changed his mind at the last moment, and decided to invest some £24,000 in a rope-works in New South Wales’ (about twenty miles north-west of Sydney). ‘In the short period of four years this fine factory was built and equipped with modern machinery.’ But by that time he was more than sixty years of age and his health failed under the strain of the new venture; ‘no one else was prepared to carry it on in a free-trade State’, with a Victorian tariff against what would otherwise have been profitable trade with that State; so there was no option, apparently, to what Laby called ‘liquidation’.