The Mayne Inheritance by Rosamond Siemon Page B

was again absent from mid-December 1861 to mid-January 1862, another five weeks. Alderman Cribb reported to the Council that he was away on urgent private affairs. This was immediately followed by the necessity of his standing down as one of three annual retirees, and a subsequent lacklustre performance in the February 1862 municipal election, when he failed to re-take his former seat. Alderman R.S. Warry replaced him. The title of alderman had given him a status that made up for lack of social acceptance. The role of alderman gave him the power he wanted to organise and run things and argue how he thought they should be done. In view of his desire and need for this role, his long absence just prior to an election is surprising. His lacklustre performance may have been due to the fact that serious illness was beginning to manifest itself, or that some lingering aspects of the anti-Mayne campaign of ridicule still worked against him. In a burst of political energy he registered his family as parishioners at the little Catholic church in Duncan Street, Fortitude Valley. It wasfrom here he hoped to gain more votes at the next election.
    From 1863, when he again stood for Council, this time successfully as representative for Fortitude Valley, his irrational comments and behaviour gradually became more obvious. If he felt Council proceedings were becoming tedious, he would produce his ‘‘monocle’’, a leather ring the size of an eye-glass. According to John Cameron’s reminiscence, if an alderman deviated from the facts or exaggerated, Mayne, who was rough in manner, would deliberately and ostentatiously place the leather ring firmly at his eye and stare at the speaker in a comic manner, to disconcert him and cause general laughter from all the others. This glass-less leather ring had such an unnerving effect on some aldermen that on one occasion the question was asked as to whether it was not a breach of the law to use a leather ring in the form of an eye-glass.
    In August 1863 Patrick began a four months’ agitation over the fire bell. With others he had approved its cost of £30, but when he found the installed bell had cost £50, he belligerently moved that it be dismantled and returned and a new one procured, not exceeding the sum voted.
    Brisbane was no stranger to fire. There was no reticulated water supply, no fire brigade, and the clusters of combustible wooden buildings with their oil lamps, naked candles and wood stoves nightly housed far too many incautious inebriates. Their safety and survival could depend on the clanging of the fire bell for quick action to limit a fire’s spread by a bucket brigade and others withpiles of soaking blankets. Mayne was well aware of the danger. Ever since he had built his brick home and shops, which were flanked by flimsy, combustible timber buildings, he had advocated an end to timber construction in the business area. Such vulnerability was devastatingly proved on 11 April 1864, when a large tract of Queen Street West was lost to the flames. One side of the block was almost annihilated when one hotel, fourteen shops, two houses and numerous offices were incinerated. Even the brick buildings were vulnerable because of their highly inflammable shingle roofs. There were no water carts, and all the private tanks in Queen, Albert, and Adelaide Streets were emptied to meet the demands of the fire, which was halted only when men of the Twelfth Regiment chopped down the North Brisbane Hotel and two shops to make a fire break. In the subsequent unprotected condition of the town, nineteen men and women were charged with stealing from the piles of salvaged goods which the frantic shopowners had stacked for safety in the street. The people had always known that they were impotent to save valuable buildings from fire; they lived with that constant dread and insecurity. Only a few days before that fire, a meeting of protesting townsfolk had called on both