Gover Street is in the greater section of the North Adelaide precinct and runs east by north-east off Jeffcott Street towards the foothills. Paired with Buxton Street and just north of Wellington Square, it is named after William Glegg Gover, of Chester Square, Pimlico.
It was an obscure inclusion on the day the Street Naming Committee met on 23 May 1837, without any obvious connection with the Commission or the parliamentarians behind the project. There is so little extant resource material about this man so as to make it almost impossible to conclusively argue why he was named at all. In essence, William Glegg Gover is one of the mystery men of the Adelaide streets. However, in a peculiar and ironic twist it is known what he was thinking at the time, and his ideas at least were entirely consistent with the radical and philanthropic thinking of the majority of the Street Naming Committee.
Like so many in Adelaide’s ‘pantheon of dissent’, Gover did at least commit some of his ideas to paper. He was a correspondent and theorist, a man of big ideas and clearly someone admired and respected by some of the young Adelphi men, especially Robert Gouger, an acknowledged friend and confidant. On this basis it is presumed that it may have been Gouger who put Gover forward on the day the streets were named. Ideologically, it would appear from this and subsequent articles sent to Adelaide by Gover in 1839 that his egalitarian, non-sectarian, pro-educational, pro-investment, anti-elite views would have been held in high regard by most of the Committee.
Gover is mentioned in the list of names of those who purchased town acres in the proposed city of Adelaide in 1836. However, in 1839 the South Australian Record carried a reference to correspondence between William Glegg Gover, late of Rio de Janeiro, and some of his friends in Brazil who were requested to send an array of tropical fruit trees to the new province for propagation. Bananas, pineapples, plantains and celeba oranges were among the species suggested. This information, without being conclusive, implies that Gover may have spent time in Rio prior to returning to London, sometime in 1838. Given that he and his business partner, Charles Grace, received papers from Rio de Janeiro on 21 May 1834 permitting them to form a gaslight company in that city, it is almost certain that he visited sometime over the next four years. Whether Gover was in Rio when George Strickland Kingston, Dr Edward Wright, Boyle Travers Finniss, Sir John Morphett and Thomas Gilbert called in during their voyage to South Australia on the Cygnet is not known. However, it seems possible if not probable. He may very well have been on hand to see that the trees and fruits mentioned above were sent on to the colony. Like Thomas Archer and to a lesser extent William Kermode, simply being in a position to help the colony get started horticulturally and agriculturally with seeds, plants and livestock may have been sufficient incentive for some to consider him important enough to be memorialised.
Whatever the circumstances, Gover certainly met some of the criteria from an ideological point of view. Possibly spurred on by having his named etched in the North Adelaide streets, he launched himself headlong into the theory and practicalities of the colonial experiment in ways which reveal both his self-interest as a private entrepreneur and his penchant for amateur social engineering.
William Glegg Gover is most notable for his membership as a director of the Secondary Towns Association, formed under the chairmanship of Colonel Agnew in 1838. Agnew unexpectedly died before any secondary towns were established and Abel Lewes Gower assumed the chairmanship. The initiative attracted 66 subscriber members.
Without wanting to appear too cynical, it would seem that these men set out to profit from the establishment of townships beyond Adelaide by exploiting that section of the Act which allowed for large investors to purchase what were known as Special Surveys. These provisions had been written into the regulations at the behest of George Fife Angas in the afterglow of his financial rescue package, when he and the directors of the South Australian Company ensured that the whole colonial project would go ahead. When Angas stepped down from the Commission because of his financial conflict of interest, he was quick to extract from the commissioners and Lord Glenelg at the Colonial Office two special dispensations on behalf of the South Australian Company. The first was the right to establish whaling stations; an opportunity denied preliminary land purchasers. The second, more telling because it was essentially contrary to the integrity of Wakefield’s theory of land utility and put large capitalists in a position of advantage. Angas convinced the commissioners that Special Surveys of 15,000 acres were an attractive manner in which to raise serious capital for the colony.
Gover was a serious capitalist, for beyond his involvement with the Secondary Towns Association he was both a director of the colony’s first railway company and a mining speculator in the Adelaide tiers, the convoluted escarpment and creek valleys beneath Mount Lofty. In the first years of the colony some settlers were successful in finding assayable quantities of minerals in these gullies. Gover, not wanting to miss an opportunity, had his agent purchase land for him near Morialta Falls, overlooking the Adelaide Plains. There is no evidence to suggest that Gover ever came to see this land, which later sold to the Stradbroke family.
Ever watchful for ongoing opportunities, Gover also became involved with the newly formed South Australian Railway Company in 1839. He was indeed an opportunistic investor. The significance of this move revolves around the fact that by 1839 the South Australian Company had begun to build a wharf at the New Port Adelaide, several kilometres from the first landing point at Port Misery. A map of all the country sections stretching from the city to the port had been drawn up and surveyed with provision for a railway to service the transportation of goods and facilitate the movement of horsedrawn carriages to and from the port to the city. The need for such a facility was obvious and a glance at the directors of this company, whose object was to raise sufficient capital to construct it, testifies to its importance. With the exception of Gover all the others were South Australian commissioners inLondon. The directors in Adelaide oversaw the railway’s construction and administration.
It is unfortunate that there is very little about Gover on the public record. Born sometime in and around 1783 he was of an age similar to the older generation represented in the Adelaide streets. This means that there was almost a generational difference between him and Gouger, suggesting that their friendship was perhaps based on some strong common belief or beliefs. This is difficult to verify, but it is likely that they both had liberal or religious views on poverty and education.
The earliest public reference to Gover reveals that he began his adult life as a carpenter, possibly a ship carpenter. At the time, he lived at Rotherhithe on the Thames, near the Deptford shipyards. He must have been good at his job, for by 1804 he had invented a significant improvement in the mechanism that enabled a ship captain to steer very large sailing vessels. This achievement was patented and first recorded publicly in 1804, with the explanation of how the invention allowed the captain, or whoever was at the helm, to gain more purchase in the steerage of a vessel, thereby saving a considerable amount of physical labour and personal energy. Such a saving would have been welcome by those fighting the elements in heavy seas. It is presumed that Gover had an enquiring mechanistic mind and a penchant for inventing useful things. In a publication in 1845 he is also cited as the inventor of a type of window sash.
One thing is certain: William Glegg Gover had a fertile imagination. A small-time entrepreneur and capitalist with an exploratory mind, he wrote three short articles for The South Australian Record in 1839 in which the loftiness and idealistic panoply of his thought processes spill onto the page like a fulsome harvest. Much of it was grandiose in the extreme, for somehow he imagined that from his pen all in the colony would heed his call and empty their pockets.
Published in Britain, The South Australian Record was by the time the colony was three years old a newsworthy instrument for those of a more radical, largely idealistic and even republican disposition to learn more about the colonisation process. It had become the voice of the true believers who remained inexorably fused to Wakefield’s principles of systematic colonisation and the concept of freedom of dissent. Gover found it the perfect outlet for his utilitarian, elitist and paternalistic dreams.
Of course, all this backslapping was taking place after Gover Street was named, and the question should be asked as to whether there was perhaps a hint of catch-up in this, given that the Gover name now stood among such illustrious dignitaries as the Duke of Wellington, Sir William Molesworth, Daniel O’Connell and Thomas Fowell Buxton. Gover viewed the experiment in Adelaide as a tabula rasa; a fresh enterprise which he hoped could be spared the excesses and malpractices he so despised in Britain. Sectarianism, an exploitative Irish aristocracy and a greedy Anglican clergy who had abused the tithing system had all left a sour taste in his mouth, and in a new land things could be different. Or so he thought! His faith in the superiority of the elites in society was palpable. Capital subscription, real estate purchases, speculative growth in land and property values, rental income and the generation of surpluses were all legitimate mechanisms with which to fund social capital.
Gover joined the newly formed South Australian Society on 28 February 1840, a body determined to honour the underlying principles of Wakefield’s scheme. However, in August 1840 the Colonial Office suspended emigration under the South Australia Act, taking back complete control. The colony was bankrupt and the flood of emigrants had been strangled to a trickle.
Unfortunately, Gover’s personal details remain sketchy. He had both a sister, Eleanor, born in 1796 and a brother, Charles Sidney Gover, but there does not seem to be a wife. There is a single woman by the name of Mary Ann Hart mentioned in his will who was to be provided with the proceeds of a lease on his Adelaide property in the form of a £62 annuity after his death. That is provided she did not marry.
Both his brother and sister may have lived with him at No. 8 Chester Square, in Pimlico. Charles certainly did, and on William’s death in 1855 Charles moved to City Club, in Old Broad Street, London. Both brother and sister featured strongly in Gover’s last will and testament. Gover was so diffuse with his investments, planting them worldwide. Mining leases in South Australia, land grants in New Zealand, town acres in New Plymouth, shares in railway companies, leases in Rio de Janeiro – the list was substantial. Furthermore he was meticulous in his ability to document and cover all exigencies in the event of his death. He was specific with respect to lease and income arrangements with each transaction. On more than one occasion he rented land, leaving the leasehold arrangements to his agent on site. With so many balls to juggle it is not surprising that some of Gover’s possessions lapsed for want of attention, sometimes for decades after his death.
In Adelaide, Gover owned land order 632, District C. Today South Australians know this property as Captain Charles Sturt’s 80-acre section No. 122 at Grange, South Australia.
William Glegg Gover died with an estate worth under £16,000.
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