Police pulled dead Bendigo councillor out of Geelong bay

The dead council leader had spent months on the run in 1856.

But had George Washington Haycock faked his own death?

"There have been reports since that a man answering his description took a prominent part in the great American struggle of some years ago," one older resident wrote 35 years later when reminiscing about days gone by in the Bendigo Advertiser.

That struggle was the American Civil War, which broke out five years after Haycock's alleged death.

So who was this globetrotting ghost and what was he running from?

Haycock was among the surge of people who had arrived on the Victorian goldfields in the madness of the 1850s, when remote valleys were transformed into a sprawling city of people and tents.

He was a roughly 40-year-old American with auburn hair intermixed with grey, a long bushy beard covering his face below his cheek bones, and a moustache with very long whiskers.

He had lived in Bendigo from about 1852 or 1853.

He had been a general storekeeper before working as a commission agent for transport company Cobb and Co, which is where he seems to have decided to start investing in livestock, land and a host of businesses. He appears to have amassed an estate worth well over $3 million in today's money.

"His credit was perhaps better than that of any man in the place," the Advertiser reported in the aftermath of his disappearance.

"He was a kind-hearted man, who has done many a good turn for his fellow-townsmen, and it is difficult for those who knew him to understand how he can have become an absconder."

Haycock left with so little warning that colleagues and business partners across the colony dismissed any suggestion he had run away.

But someone in Bendigo was chasing him for £2000 (roughly $413,000 today) over a hotel sale and a "large number" of miners feared they would lose money they had left with him.

Even the council was frantically checking its accounts.

It feared the man councillors had appointed treasurer may have gotten his paws on public money.

He had not, much to their relief - and he seems to have made a conscious effort to avoid needlessly dragging anyone into his financial crisis.

Months trickled by with no word about Haycock.

Then, in late September, police found the body in a bay and some clothes on a nearby jetty.

Among scraps of paper in the pockets were notes saying "I am Geo W. Haycock" and "I wish my acquaintances to know my fate at once".

Haycock's death was met with a skeptical response by many in the colony. They suspected the body was part of an elaborate ruse.

So a group of men had the body swiftly exhumed. Lawyer Charles Bencraft was among those who went to inspect the dead man.

"The body taken out of the coffin was not the body of George Washington Haycock," he told an insolvency court in late September 1856.

"I examined the body carefully before I expressed any opinion. I had however at the first glance, noticed that it was not Haycock's."

Bencroft had known Haycock for three years and seen him in Melbourne a week before he vanished.

"Even if the insolvent had dyed his hair, he would have still been altogether unlike the man whose body was shown to me," Bencroft said.

Not everyone agreed.

Bendigo resident Daniel Hunt had also known Haycock for years and had seen his body at the funeral.

"I swear that the body I saw at Geelong was that of Mr Haycock," Hunt said.

Others confirmed they had seen a dead Haycock before the funeral, too. With confusion mounting, the body was exhumed a second time.

Then things got weirder.

To illustrate how bizarre Haycock's death had become, it's worth touching on a case that came before Bendigo magistrates midway through October 1856.

Businessman Decimus Prothero had been summoned to court after literally ripping off a doctor's beard outside the Shamrock Hotel. The violent and unprovoked attack had its origins in the moment a few weeks before when Haycock's body was exhumed a second time.

Prothero had been one of six people who carefully examined the body and signed their names to a document declaring the insolvent American really was dead, after all.

So he had been deeply offended when an anonymous person had written into the Advertiser saying his efforts were "not only puerile but childish".

The letter was the 1850s equivalent of an internet troll's bile. It suggested Prothero and his companions must have been mentally deficient.

As if in some sort of fantasy, Prothero decided to do what anyone targeted by an internet troll might dream of doing. He decided to confront them.

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It is not clear exactly why Prothero decided that White Hill doctor John Hutchinson had written the letter.

But a traumatised Hutchinson claimed Prothero grabbed him, pushed him into the side of the building and pulled his beard clean off his chin.

The case caught the entire colony's imagination.

Prothero told the court he most certainly had ripped Hutchinson's beard off.

He then took out a carefully folded paper containing the beard and sarcastically declared that he had spoken to well-known local hairdresser Charles Sands about making "the chin of the worthy doctor all right for eightpence", the Advertiser reported.

The court controversially decided to fine Prothero instead of jailing him.

Within days, comic musicians and poets were penning works with names like "Why Don't You Shave? or Prothero v. Hutchinson" and "A Ballad of A Beard".

Prothero should not have been so worried about the letter.

Most people in Bendigo trusted in the reputations of the six men who had examined Haycock's body, the Advertiser reported.

"The mystery of the whole affair still continued, but the majority of the public were disposed to accept of it as a fact that the body was that of Mr. Haycock," the Advertiser said.

Still, it would be nice to think he had avoided a lonely death in 1856. Hopefully he really did escape to America and find a way to ease his troubled heart.

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This is the latest in the Bendigo Weekly's history series 'WHAT HAPPENED?' Our thanks to the Bendigo Regional Archive Centre's Sue Walter and Desiree Petit-Keating for their help with this story.

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