St. David's Uniting Church

About

St David's Uniting Church is a heritage-listed Uniting church and associated precinct at 51- 53 Dalhousie Street, Haberfield, Inner West Council, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It was designed by Simeon Lord, David Ramsay, William Munro, J. A. B. Campbell, Power, Adam, and Munning, Thomas Rowe, and Ferdinand Reuss and built from 1860 to 1900 by Williams, Ravers, Duffy and Cannon. It is also known as St. David's Uniting Church, St Davids Presbyterian Church Precinct and includes the St David's Sunday School/Yasmar School, Ramsay Vault and Ramsay Graveyard. The property is owned by the Uniting Church in Australia. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 19 August 2003.

St David's Church and its associated complex lie on part of the 190 hectares (470 acres) known as Sunning Hill Farm, granted in August 1803 to Nicholas Bayly. Bayly, a well-connected member of the New South Wales Corps, had a stormy career in the colony and resigned his commission six weeks after this grant was made. Sunning Hill Farm, portion 257 of Concord parish, occupied the area of present-day Haberfield, from Parramatta Road north to Iron Cove, bounded on the west by what are now Wattle Street and Dobroyd Parade, on the east by the later canal along Hawthorn Parade.

Bayly sold Sunning Hill Farm after only nineteen months, in March 1805, to the ambitious young emancipist Simeon Lord. Earlier in 1805 Lord had gone into partnership with Henry Kable (who already held what became Summer Hill ) and James Underwood (who later bought Kable's land). Lord at once changed the name of Bayly's farm to Dobroyde, his preferred spelling of his Yorkshire birthplace.

Lord expanded his land holdings in the area to 600 hectares (1500 acres), with 16 hectares (40 acres) "cleared and divided into paddocks". On the property, just to the south-west of the present St David's, between the later Dalhousie Street and Orpington Street (now Rogers Avenue), Lord built a homestead, described in his advertisement for a lessee in 1816 as: an elegant villa, fit for the reception of a small genteel family, with suitable detached kitchen, dairy, stable, coach house, piggery, cow house and stockyard, together with the most productive garden, containing some of the finest trees in the Colony.

In March 1825 Simeon Lord's daughter, Sarah Ann, married a 31-year-old Scottish doctor, David Ramsay, and the bride's dowry was Dobroyde Estate. Though the settlement of the land was not formally completed until May 1826, the couple moved in to the house at once in 1825 and commenced the building of a new carriage-house, stables and cow-house in December 1825. Ramsay, a graduate in medicine from the University of Edinburgh and a native of Perth, had first visited Australia in 1820 as a ship's doctor on the "Surry" under the captaincy of Thomas Raine. In 1823 Raine and Ramsay (after taking Governor Macquarie back to Britain) settled in Sydney and from 1823 until 1828 ran in partnership a business in the heart of the city, as shipowners, agents, general merchants and woolbrokers.

The failure of the firm of Raine and Ramsay in 1828 encouraged Ramsay (who had given up medical practice) to develop his 800 hectares (2,000 acres) grazing property on the Fish River and to live more intensively at Dobroyde House. At Dobroyde he developed an important plant nursery and established a new citrus orchard between Ramsay Road and Long Cove Creek, although much of the land down to Dobroyd Point remained uncleared bush, with pockets of development.

Sarah and David Ramsay had eleven children and from the 1830s onwards extended Simeon Lord's Dobroyde House to accommodate the increasing family. They were dedicated Presbyterians and philanthropists. In 1840 they set up the first Presbyterian Sunday School in the colony, using the verandah of the extended Dobroyde House. As the elder Ramsay daughters grew up, they did the bulk of the Sunday School teaching in the 1840s and 1850s

The Sunday School teaching was transferred from Dobroyde House to the nearby Yasmar in the late 1840s. In 1855 Mary Loulsa Ramsay (1826-1914), Dr Ramsay's eldest daughter, married another Scot, Alexander Learmonth (1820-1877), the senior partner in Learmonth, Dickinson and Co, stock and station agents. Soon after their marriage, the couple built their fine house, Yasmar (Ramsay backwards), on the Ramsay estate 300 metres (980 ft) north-west of Dobroyde House. Alexander Learmonth was 'an intelligent and zealous Presbyterian': he and his wife gave their time and fortune unstintingly to the church.

Dr Ramsay died in 1860. Although he "had devised liberal things for planting a Church and School" on his estate, mental illness had prevented him from going further (Steel & Cosh, Irving & Pratten) Immediately after his death, his widow, together with the Learmonths, began to realise these aspirations. Mrs Ramsay divided Dobroyde estate among her children, but laid aside 1.6 hectare (4 acres 16 perches) for burial-ground, church, school-hall and manse in the spatial proportions of 9:15:35:41. The 1.6 hectares (4.0 acres) were bounded by Dalhousie Road to the west, by Margaret Ramsay's portion to the north and east, and on the south by the 4.4 hectares (11 acres) allotted to her sister, Mrs Isabella Belisario. In 1861-2 Mrs Ramsay proceeded to build only the family vault and the school-hall.

The vault for Dr Ramsay was completed sometime before June 1862. No details are available about the architect or the builder of the vault. The finely constructed stone memorial, consisting of seven courses of sandstone blocks above ground at the rectangular dromos, the entrance with stone steps leading down westwards to a square vaulted burial chamber, largely underground but with stone walls above ground to the same roof level as the dromos. The portion of the stone roof which covers the burial chamber has at each corner a stone base surmounted by a large stone urn: these ums were recently replaced after years of neglect lying on the adjacent ground.

Dr Ramsay himself had initially been buried somewhere in the grounds of Dobroyde House in 1860. There were already two other family burials in the grounds: an unnamed child of Dr and Mrs Ramsay who died at birth in 1841 and a grandchild, Buchan Thomson, who died aged six weeks in 1858. All three bodies were transferred to the new underground vault, probably in 1861.

The expression "Vault Reserve", not cemetery, is used for the entire burial area on the earliest plan of the Presbyterian complex in c. 1867. The use of the term "vault" is broader than the actual underground burial place. Ramsay's son-in-law, Alexander Learmonth, was said by the ministers who presided at his funeral in 1877 to be buried in the vault, but he was in fact buried in the adjacent area, where a fine obelisk was erected in his memory. Similarly most members of the Belisario family were buried in their own area of their serve. Dr John Belisario, a distinguished early dentist in Sydney, married Isabella Helen Ramsay, third daughter of Dr and Mrs Ramsay, in 1854: their children, Sallie, John, Catherine, Clive and Ethel, were all buried in plot 2 between 1862 and 1947, while Isabella herself, Mrs Belisario, was also buried there in 1908. Isabella's sister, Sarah Elizabeth Ramsay and her husband Buchan Thomson are buried in plot 6, although their son, another Buchan, is in the underground vault.

There are twenty grave plots altogether, including the vault, holding 53 burials. In addition to direct members of the Ramsay and Learmonth families, Simeon Lord junior, the brother of the original Mrs Sarah Ramsay, is interred with his wife (in plot 8). The only burials of people unrelated to the Ramsays are of Mrs Annie Mackenzie, in plot 3, the wife of the first minister of St Davids, and in plot 4 Percy Pope, the infant son of the first Mayor of Ashfield and one of the trustees for the property. These non-family burials took place in 1868 and 1871 respectively and thereafter the cemetery was reserved for Ramsays by birth or marriage.

This exclusive nature of the reserve was confirmed in an agreement of 1902, declaring that the entire Vault Reserve was "a private family burial ground" with guarantees of access as on the 1860s plan.

In 1907 the Ramsay family erected a new two-metre (seven-foot) high fence around the whole Vault Reserve: palings were used on all sides except the west (towards the church) where pickets were preferred with a lockable gate. There was at the same time a "general renovation of the Burial ground". In 1910 the perimeter was trenched and the present hedge of trees planted. In recent years the cemetery has been tidied and renovated by Ramsay family initiatives.

After Dr Ramsay's death Mrs Ramsay and her daughter and son-in-law, the Learmonths, acted decisively to build a hall to house primarily the existing Presbyterian Sunday School. Up to a hundred children from the surrounding rural area were attending the Sunday School by 1860 and it was increasingly difficult to accommodate them at Yasmar. William Munro, a well-known Scottish builder-become-architect, was commissioned to design a suitable school-room. Munro had emigrated with his mother and siblings from northern Scotland in 1838 after the death of his father. William established himself as a carpenter and builder at Liverpool in New South Wales. In 1846 he built Holy Trinity Anglican church at Berrima to Edmund Blacket 's design and in the 1850s became a more independent builder-architect. He was closely associated with St Mary's Catholic Cathedral in town from 1856 until 1861 and then embarked on a wider general practice, including other Catholic churches, in Sydney, Newcastle and the South Coast. He became much more involved in Presbyterian activities in the 1870s, when he designed St Andrew's College at the University of Sydney and St Stephen's Presbyterian Church in Phillip Street. Munro was, therefore a busy builder and designer, though closely associated with the Catholic church, when Mrs Ramsay and the Learmonths commissioned him to build the school-hall on Dobroyde estate in 1861.

In July 1861 the foundation stone of the hall was laid by Percy Ramsay, the youngest child of Dr and Mrs Ramsay. On 26 June 1862 the building was opened at a ceremony dominated by Dr John Dunmore Lang, the stormy petrel of Presbyterianism in New South Wales. A grandson of Dr and Mrs Ramsay was baptised during the ceremonies. The Empire (newspaper) newspaper described the new school-hall in enthusiastic terms as "a handsome brick building, in the plain Gothic style, with doorways, window sills and quoins of polished stone. It has four double windows and projecting buttresses on each side, with a porch in front, a high pitched roof, and a belfry, in appearance, overtopping it, the latter being intended exclusively, however, for ventilation, as the school bell is to be hung on one of the adjoining trees. The building is fifty feet by twenty-five in the clear, and is capable of accommodating not fewer than three hundred pupils".

From 1866 until St David's Church was completed in 1869 church services were held in the hall.

Less than a month after the Sunday School opened in its new premises under the name Yasmar Sabbath School and under the superintendence of Alexander Learmonth, Dr Lang asked the Board of National Education, on behalf of the Ramsays, to establish a public day school in the hall. Lang wrote: 'As there is already a Sunday school of a hundred pupils held in the school, there can be no reason to doubt that there will be a sufficient population within a reasonable distance to warrant its establishment'. The school was to be 'non-vested': this was an arrangement available since 1858 whereby the building and land remained the property of the Presbyterians but the teaching and staffing were under the control of the Board of National Education. The government agreed to Lang's proposal and Dobroyde school opened in October 1861.

There was, however, a striking difference between the hundred Presbyterian children present on Sundays and the maximum of forty-seven, mostly Anglican children who attended the day-school. The reason for the disparity is the usual fact of rural life in the nineteenth century, that children were needed to help on the land or in the homestead or in the shop. The Ashfield-Haberfield area was still in 1862 basically rural, despite the development of Ashfield village in the 1840s and the increase of services encouraged by the gold fever of the 1850s. Ashfield school on the Liverpool road had opened in 1862, nine months before Dobroyde, also as a non-vested school, meeting in the Methodist chapel. This was closer to the bulk of the population, but the premises were small and poorly maintained and in 1875 a new public school building was erected. The enrolment at Ashfield increased from 52 in 1875, the last year of the old school, to 211 in the following year. By contrast, Dobroyde's attendance declined from a peak of 42 in 1872 to 25 in 1875 and less than ten in 1876. Accordingly, Dobroyde day school was closed down in October 1876. One of the early teachers was Peter Dodds McCormick, a charismatic musician and Presbyterian enthusiast, who in 1878 published his " Advance Australia Fair ", which had first been performed in 1868.