Jane Turner: A Life – Taylor Family History

Jane Turner was born on 28 December 1854 in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, England, the daughter of Charles Turner and Maria Bertha Palmer. Wolverhampton in the 1850s was an industrial landscape of canals, railway yards, and ironworks. Charles Turner worked for the Great Western Railway, his employment anchored in the canal and railway world of England’s Black Country. The family lived in and around Canal Street and Horseley Fields, a neighbourhood defined by working-class industry and transport. Jane would retain little memory of these early years. She was not quite two years old when her parents made the decisive choice to emigrate.

Charles Turner resigned from the railway in November 1856. A small Bible given to him just before his departure survives among his descendants—a tangible record of the moment the family committed to leaving England. In late November 1856, Charles, Maria, and their daughters Eliza and Jane sailed from Liverpool aboard the Ann Wilson, bound for New Zealand. The voyage took approximately four months. Maria was pregnant during the passage. When the ship reached Wellington in March 1857, she gave birth to another daughter, Sarah. Thus Jane Turner became an immigrant without having chosen migration herself. England was her birthplace, but New Zealand would be where she grew up and where the formative events of her life would unfold.

The Turners did not establish themselves in Wellington. Charles’s restless energies drove the family inland and eventually toward the Coromandel Peninsula, in the upper North Island. He became associated with the district during the New Zealand Wars, serving in the militia. As the family enlarged with additional children born in New Zealand, Jane grew up as one of many Turner siblings whose lives would eventually disperse across the colonial world.

At the age of sixteen, Jane married Henry Waldren on 9 October 1871 at St George’s Church in Shortland, Thames. Henry was a Cornish miner, part of the nineteenth-century diaspora of Cornish mining families seeking opportunity abroad. By the standards of her era, Jane’s early marriage was not unusual, but it was consequential. She and Henry had at least three children together before the marriage came to an end—though the exact circumstances of its dissolution remain obscure in the available records.

By 1882, Jane was a widow with three dependent children. On 8 September that year, she married again, this time to John Taylor at Holy Trinity Church, Tauranga, in the Bay of Plenty. John Taylor was an English-born man, born in 1855 at East Stonehouse, Plymouth. He had come to New Zealand by the early 1880s and was serving in the New South Wales Artillery when they married. The couple soon relocated to New South Wales. Their son John Benjamin was born on 16 November 1883 at Watsons Bay, Sydney, and another son, Sydney Ernest, followed in 1889. By that time the family was living in Paddington, close to Victoria Barracks.

In 1891, John Taylor’s military life took an abrupt and dramatic turn. He was working as Battery Quartermaster-Sergeant, a position of considerable trust that placed him in charge of government funds. In August of that year he disappeared from Sydney, leaving behind unaccounted-for government money. He had stolen away aboard the s.s. Konoowarra, assuming a new identity and launching an audacious attempt at reinvention. Within weeks of arriving in Western Australia, he had secured appointment to the newly formed Western Australian Police Force under the alias John Ring. The deception was short-lived. A New South Wales police sergeant named James Edward Sawtell tracked him to Perth and arrested him in December 1891 on a warrant charging theft. John Taylor’s flight and capture represented one of the era’s small dramas of colonial reinvention and the growing capacity of colonial authorities to retrieve those who disappeared.

What this meant for Jane is largely undocumented. The records offer only silence on how she managed during his absence and arrest, or what became of their life together afterward. Yet by 1895, we find Jane established at Esperance, a small port town on Western Australia’s south coast, far from Sydney and the scandal of John’s arrest. Esperance was a new frontier in the 1890s, a place where people went to make fresh starts.

It was at Esperance that Jane Turner acquired the affectionate title by which she would be remembered: “Granny Taylor.” She took work as a hotelkeeper, and beyond that formal employment, she became known as a midwife and informal nurse. In a time and place where medical practitioners were scarce, Jane’s presence was critical during moments of crisis and illness. In 1947, decades after her death, an Esperance resident wrote to the Kalgoorlie Miner remembering her with affection. The writer recalled that whenever there was serious sickness in the district, Jane would be there, attending to the sick “day and night.” By the time this tribute appeared in print, “Granny Taylor” had been dead for three years. The Esperance Museum would preserve material about her, and reminiscences of her work continued to circulate in the district long after her death.

Jane Turner died on 23 December 1944 in Bassendean, a suburb of Perth, at an advanced age. She was buried in Karrakatta Cemetery in Perth. Her funeral record notes simply her plot location: K-AN-WF-0434. She had lived for nearly ninety years, spanning the reign of Queen Victoria and reaching into World War II. Her life had traced a remarkable geography: born in industrial England, she had emigrated as an infant to New Zealand, lived through the turbulent early colonial decades there, moved to New South Wales, and eventually settled in Western Australia. She had been a wife, a widow, and a wife again. She had borne children, raised them, and outlived the era that bore her.

What survives of Jane Turner are fragments preserved in family records, government documents, and the fading memories of a small Western Australian coastal town. Those fragments suggest a woman of practical capability, resilience, and commitment to the welfare of others. In an era when women’s lives were often recorded only in relation to their husbands and children, Jane Turner carved out a space for herself as a skilled practitioner of the arts of healing and midwifery. She became “Granny Taylor” not through blood relation but through her work and presence in the community. In Esperance’s frontier world, that was enough to earn her a place in local memory and, eventually, in family history.

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Last updated 22 September 2026

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