An Australian Story

Using Wealth for Philanthropy

Much credit must go to his parents, particularly his father, George. In 1841 George Renwick and his wife Christina arrived in Sydney as bounty immigrants from Glasgow in Scotland with Arthur, 4, and William, 3. George, a bricklayer and later a plasterer, was ambitious and had a sense of adventure. In 1851 he joined the exodus to the Victorian goldfields, taking 14-year-old Arthur with him. According to family lore, Arthur injured his foot so badly in the camp at Ballarat that a doctor had to be called in, and this chance meeting inspired the boy to become a doctor himself.

Did George Renwick find gold? We don’t know, but a lucky strike would explain how he could afford to buy a three-story terrace house in a fashionable new development in Pitt Street, Redfern, and educate Arthur first at Redfern Grammar School, and later at the new University of Sydney, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts, followed by a medical degree at the prestigious Edinburgh University.

Arthur would not have remembered the hardships and privations of life in Glasgow's slums, but his parents would never have forgotten them. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes characterised human life before the development of society and laws as 'poor, nasty, brutish and short', but this applied equally to the lives of most people in Britain’s cities in the first half of the 19th century. Industrialisation had helped a small minority to prosper, but sickness was a constant threat in the crowded, insanitary tenement slums of Glasgow’s East End, and only the strong and the lucky reached the age of 40. Typhus broke out in Glasgow the year the Renwicks emigrated.

Over the next 56 years, George Renwick transformed himself from a penniless immigrant tradesman into a successful politician and a wealthy property developer. He entered local politics the year his son returned from Edinburgh and was later elected first mayor of the Municipality of Redfern. It was from their father that Arthur and his siblings learned the efficacy of hard work, ambition and networking.

As is often the case, business went hand in hand with politics. In the 1870s George and several colleagues in the building trades set up the Industrial and Provident Permanent Building Society, a 'friendly society' that enabled the directors to assemble small savings and channel them into housing. From there it was a short step to property development. In the 1880s, at what would be the beginning of a land boom, he became a director of the Excelsior Land Investment and Building Company and Bank, which built subdivisions at Marrickville, Leichhardt and Toronto on the central coast. Not the sorts of men to hide their lights under a bushel, the developers named the streets in these estates after themselves. 

The Renwick children also learned compassion from their parents. George and Christina were evangelical Christians who believed that the strong had a duty to help the weak. When George died in 1897 at 86 — 46 years longer than he could have expected to live in Glasgow — he had been been president of the Randwick Asylum for Destitute Children for 25 years, a director of the Deaf and Dumb and Blind Institution for many years, and had been on the committee of The Benevolent Society since 1875.

George Renwick had done very well for himself and his family, and he did good for others. Either because of George’s example, or because he wanted to outdo his father, Arthur Renwick followed the same path, but with the advantages of a good education, a gentle upbringing and his father’s connections, he achieved more and rose higher.

Bessie Saunders, a Strong Woman

With his name in the news and his private practice flourishing, Arthur Renwick married Elizabeth 'Bessie' Saunders in the Congregational Church in Redfern in 1868. Arthur had started life as a Presbyterian and Elizabeth as a Baptist, but both their fathers had converted to Congregationalism, a nonconformist protestant denomination that became become popular in the 19th century. In a time when religious bigotry was rife, the Renwicks were notably tolerant: their eldest son, Arthur, became an Anglican minister, and their son, Charles, a doctor who served with the AIF in World War 1, was a Methodist.

Arthur Renwick did not choose a spoiled socialite as a wife. At 24, Elizabeth Saunders had led an adventurous, tumultuous and insecure life. Her father the Rev. John Saunders had come to New South Wales from England as a Baptist missionary in 1834 and took over a small, disorganised and demoralised congregation. Rough and rackety New South Wales was suffering from the social problems that accompanied a steady flow of convicts from Britain.

Through a campaign of preaching, adult baptisms, lectures and networking, John Saunders made an indelible mark on the moral landscape of the colony. Appalled by the damage caused to families by drunkenness, he became the voice of the temperance cause, but he also campaigned for the alleviation of poverty, public education, and the rights of Aborigines. Saunders health began to fail, and in 1847 the family returned to England, and when he died in 1859, aged only 53, his wife and daughter were left penniless. The Sydney Morning Herald raised £650 for his widow, and after her daughter had finished her schooling, Elizabeth Saunders brought her back to Sydney. 

If Arthur Renwick was influenced by his father, he was also influenced by his father-in-law. Hard work, sacrifice and evangelical Christianity had been the air Bessie Saunders breathed from birth. In Arthur Renwick she found a life partner who shared her religious beliefs and her thirst for social justice. She would sit on the women's committees of many of his charities, and supported her own causes, which included the Womanhood Suffrage League of NSW.

But Bessie Saunders knew what it was like to face destitution. It was already clear that Arthur, unlike her impractical father, would become successful in the worldly sphere as well as the spiritual, and she and their children would never have to fear poverty and social exclusion.

Like his father, Arthur went into politics, but at the state level, where he could achieve more. He served in the Legislative Assembly from 1887 and in the Legislative Council from 1888 until his death. He also made a considerable fortune in business, becoming director of an insurance company, a building society, and the Australian Widows' Fund.