Born on 15 December 1808, probably in the city of New York, William Martin Leggett grew up amid the forests and farms of Sussex Vale on the Kennebecasis River, New Brunswick, British North America. His parents, both teachers, took charge of the Indian Academy there. Both had their verse published in provincial newspapers, and Leggett’s maternal aunt, Rachel Martin, was a poet of note. William was educated by his parents. His own verse began appearing as early as 1827 and when his anthology The Forest Wreath was published in 1833, he was hailed as a prodigy. He followed his parents into teaching but in 1835 turned from his Anglican upbringing to become a missionary in the Wesleyan Church, serving at posts in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the West Indies. His second volume of verse, Sacred Poetry By a Wesleyan Minister, appeared in 1840.
However in 1845, when William left New Brunswick for England to pursue a career in letters, he effectively disappeared. Recent research has unearthed his subsequent career. It reveals that he adopted a new identity, joining the British Army under the name William Alonzo Campbell, and in 1848 was shipped to Sydney as part of a convict guard. His life in New South Wales was peripatetic and varied: teacher at remote country schools, journalist, gold-digger, manager of a sheep and cattle run on the Castlereagh, soup kitchen attendant in the slums of Sydney, free selector. Much of it was spent in genteel poverty, battling for food and shelter, but his pen never rested.
He wrote verse epics and reminiscences of New Brunswick for the Bathurst Free Press as W. M. Leggett. By the early 1850s, he had styled himself William Montague Clarence Campbell and by that name was known for the rest of his days, but for literary purposes he favoured pseudonyms. In Henry Parkes’ Empire he advocated constitutional reform and independence as 'Alonzo.' He wrote whimsical scraps for the Singleton Times as the 'Man of the Caves, O.N.P.' ('One of Nature’s Peers') from his hermitage on the Wombo Mountains, and acted as the paper’s Muswellbrook correspondent. In Sydney in 1864 he established the Woollahra Academy – grand in name only – and as 'The Woollahra Hermit' wrote verse and essays for the Illustrated Sydney News. There too he advertised a threepenny weekly, the Woollahra Hermit’s Own, and embarked on his never-published epic poem 'Individuality; or, a Historical Sketch of the Mind of an Honest Man, struggling to surmount Religious, Political and Literary Obstacles.'
In the anti-Irish hysteria following Henry James O’Farrell’s attempt on the life of royal visitor Prince Alfred at Clontarf in 1868, William was recruited by the Parkes government to spy on supposed Fenians in the streets and pubs of Glebe, after which he contributed verse and stories to the virulently anti-Catholic Australian Protestant Banner as Campbell, 'W.M.C.C' and 'Clarence' of the 'Theological Observatory'.
Towards the end of that year, William was given charge of the little government school at Eurobodalla, on the south coast of New South Wales, arriving there a few months after the death of poet Charles Harpur. He penned nature verse like 'A Night-Visit to the Oaks at Eurobodalla,' and an ode over Harpur’s grave on the hill at Euroma. He sent graphic accounts to the Sydney papers describing the Tuross floods, relating how he and his son had fought through the waters to the assistance of Harpur’s widow Mary. Then in 1870, at Runnymede (now Runnyford) on the banks of the Buckenbowra River west of Bateman’s Bay, William set up a provisional school and, with the aid of sons Rodolph and Alpheus, hacked a farm out of the bush up the river. He called the place Lordsland. He continued to send verse to newspapers, corresponded with pioneer geologist William Branwhite Clarke, and sent cranky letters to the Australian Freemason on what he took to be the godless science of Thomas Huxley.
In 1839, in New Brunswick William had married Mary Ann Stevens, the daughter of devout Wesleyans. She bore him three children, only one of whom survived infancy. On 13 January 1851, at the Scotch Church in Bowenfels, New South Wales, he married again, this time to Charlotte Crawford, schoolteacher and governess, who had arrived in Sydney in 1849 as matron to a shipload of Irish famine orphan girls. In the absence of any New Brunswick divorce record, it seems likely that this marriage was bigamous.
William died at Lordsland on 25 April 1878, aged 70, and is probably buried on his property. His death certificate holds a bombshell: father: George IV; father’s occupation: King of England; mother: Lady Mary Campbell. William’s claim to royal blood was not new. In 1868, he had tried to persuade Parkes that he was the son of the Duke of Clarence (the future William IV), adopted under royal instruction by Sir Archibald Campbell, Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick. Other, less spectacular claims – an M.A. from Cambridge, membership of the Dragoon Guards, secretaryship to the Governor-General of Canada, a stipendiary magistracy in the West Indies – are not borne out, and the claim in some Canadian sources that he took holy orders in the Anglican Church before he left New Brunswick is contradicted in his own correspondence.
William’s literary career in Australia would never realise the promise of The Forest Wreath, but his newspaper verse – well crafted, sometimes droll, sometimes darkly visionary – and his lively, opinionated prose mark him as a writer of talent, and one who belongs as much to Australian literature as to that of Canada. His early life is outlined in the New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia, while his time in England and Australia has been described in the article 'William Martin Leggett: The "Bard of New Brunswick" in Australia' (Script & Print 40:4, 2016).
Source: Written and supplied by Chris Vening.
