Brislington House Long Fox Manor Now luxury flats and re-named after a Georgian pioneer in psychiatric treatment, the old Brislington House is more warmly remembered as a home for nurses.There is a 150 year-old link between Brislington, Bristol and the City of the Eels in Australia.

Brislington House was built in 1821, and for nearly a century housed the Brown family of doctors. However, even older Bristolians would have problems recognising it because it stands in Parramatta, New South Wales, Australia.

Yet there is a strong link with Bristol’s Brislington and Keynsham and that part of Australia, as former Bristolian Bill Cridland discovered on a visit. The house was built for one John Hodge, a prisoner who had been transported to New South Wales in 1806. He tried to escape by stowing away on a whaler, but was recaptured, so he settled down-under with a wife and children and began a life of petty crime. He managed to win his freedom with a rather dubious venture involving horse and cart hire, and ran a very successful illicit grog business.

Then he won £1,000 in gold at cards, bought some land and started building the house. As the eight of diamonds had been his winning card, he had an eight of diamonds design picked out in brickwork on a back wall. However Hodge had to sell the house when he was jailed for a year for illegally selling drink. It was then discovered that his kitchen fireplace had been made from a stolen mortuary stone (the slab later became a garden seat).

The house was sold in 1825 together with one of the first five wells dug in Australia. By 1857, it was occupied by Dr Walter Brown who named it Brislington after the (then) Somerset village in which he was born in 1821. He was one of nine children of architect John Brown and his wife Mary. His mother died when he was 10 but he was well educated by his father.

When he was 16 he was apprenticed to Bristol surgeon I.G. Lansdown before training further at Edinburgh University. He became a General Practitioner in Keynsham before emigrating to New South Wales where he settled in Parramatta (Aborigine for ‘City of the Eels’).

image above: Brislington House. The home of the Brown family in Parramatta, New South Wales.

When British troops withdrew from the colony, the Parramatta Volunteer Rifle Corps was founded with Dr Brown as captain. Every evening the corps marched down the main street from the government house to assemble outside Brislington where the union flag was lowered at sunset.

Dr Brown was also a strong force behind the development of hospital facilities in the settlement after having to remove an ovarian cyst from a patient in a local boarding house. By the time he died in 1897, a new hospital was under construction. His son, Walter Sigismund, took over Brislington and the practice in 1889, and his grandson, Keith, followed in 1919. But in 1947, the hospital decided to take over Brislington as a nurses home and Dr Keith moved to a nearby street until his death in 1962.

Brislington had been a family home and medical practice for 92 years, and today houses a collection of medical and nursing memorabilia. It also holds some pictures of Bristol’s Brislington. Bill Cridland, who lived in Be-I-Bristol, Yennora, New South Wales, comments, ‘I took a book along showing some pictures of Brislington old and new, which they copied, so they may find a space there somewhere.

As Walter Brown was one of five children, it is likely that there are still members of the family still living in Bristol’.