Jane Barton

Jane Barton
Lady Barton
Barton in 1930
Spouse of the Prime Minister of Australia
In office
1 January 1901 – 24 September 1903
Preceded by Position established
Succeeded by Pattie Deakin
Prime Minister Edmund Barton
Personal details
Born Jane Ross
(1851-06-11)11 June 1851
Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia
Died 23 March 1938(1938-03-23) (aged 86)
Darling Point, New South Wales, Australia
Spouse(s)
Edmund Barton
(m. 1877–1920)
Children 6

Jane Barton (née Ross; born 11 June 1851 – 23 March 1938) was the wife of Sir Edmund Barton, the first Prime Minister of Australia (1901–1903).

She was the eldest daughter of David Ross of Newcastle, New South Wales. In 1877, at the age of 26, she married Edmund Barton, who was then a New South Wales barrister. She was known to relatives as "Jean" or "Jeanie".

From 1896, the Bartons' house Miandetta in Carabella Street, North Sydney was the site of 'open house' meetings on the subject of Federation.[1] Some of the most frequent attendees of the meeting would become prominent in the formation of Australia, namely Robert Garran, Atlee Hunt and Thomas Bavin.

One of the ways in which Lady Barton helped her husband with the cause of Federation was when she served as vice-president of the second Sydney Women's Federal League. She lived in Sydney during her husband's prime ministership; the national capital at that time was Melbourne, as Canberra had not yet been built.

Later in life, after her husband left politics to join the High Court in 1903, she served as the first president of the Queen's Club in Sydney and was a member of the first committee of the Crown Street Women's Hospital.[2] After her husband's death in 1920, she moved to London for a period, returning to Sydney in 1927. In May 1935, she made possibly her last appearance in public at a service in Centennial Park to celebrate the silver jubilee of King George V. In March 1938, Lady Barton died aged 86 years at "Avenel", the Darling Point home she and her husband moved into in 1909.

Children

Edmund and Jane Barton had six children:[3]

  • Edmund Alfred Barton (29 May 1879 – 13 November 1949), a New South Wales judge
  • Wilfrid Alexander Barton (1880 – 1953), first Rhodes Scholar for New South Wales
  • Jean Alice Barton (1882 – 1957), married Sir David Maughan (1873 – 1955) in 1909
  • Arnold Hubert Barton (3 January 1884 – 1948), married Jane Hungerford in 1909; he migrated to Canada
  • Oswald Barton (8 January 1888 – 6 February 1956), a medical doctor
  • Leila Stephanie Barton (1892 – 1976), married Robert Christopher Churchill Scot-Skirving in 1915

References

  1. ↑ Australia's Prime Ministers
  2. ↑ Obituaries Australia
  3. ↑ Australian Dictionary of Biography
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.