James Eaglestone

James’s father Gabriel Eaglestone came to Natal in 1850 on the Unicorn. He was a stonemason and was supposed to have worked on the Houses of Parliament in London. Gabriel was responsible for building St Peter’s in Pietermaritzburg and the Victoria Bridge over the Umsindusi. He drowned himself in the Umsindusi on 13 February 1860. Five days after his death his son and partner James suffered another grievous blow. His young wife Elizabeth died in childbirth and their baby died on the same day. She and James must have been friendly before James left England as he stood surety for the repayment of her fare when she took passage to Natal under the government assisted immigration scheme then in operation. She arrived on the Priscilla in March 1859, and they were married the following month, after a separation of at least eight and half years. In the Commercial Road cemetery is an elaborate tombstone to the memory of Gabriel and his daughter-in- law, carved presumably by James, her sorrowing husband, on which he records her death ‘after a brief but happy union of ten months and thirteen days’. Six months after his father’s death James appears in the jury lists for Pietermaritzburg County as a stonecutter of Uys Doorns, and an owner of property. According to Mrs Gladys Archibald’s notes filed with Charles Dacomb’s diary in the Killie Campbell African Library, James in the absence of a priest buried Dacomb’s brother-in-law Francis J. Cooke (son of H.W. Cooke), in July 1865 in the Lower Umzinto (Kelso) cemetery, which presumably indicates James was resident in the area by then. A few years later James married Jane Paddock. James died in Pietermaritzburg in 1867. Jane then married Charles Knox, son of Henry Knox, in Sep. 1869.