Includes scrapbooks on Henry Kendall , Louisa Lawson and the Lawson family.

HENRY KENDALL:

“Rosebank” has a link with Henry Kendall, through a romantic association, which developed while the Bennetts were living at Newtown. Rose, born in 1848 and Samuel Bennett’s oldest surviving daughter, was the Rose of Henry Kendall’s poem “Rose Lorraine”. In the 1860’s, the Kendalls, Henry’s widowed mother, Henry and his three sisters lived in nearby in “Randall Terrace”, in Enmore Road. Rose was a good friend of Kendall’s sister, Josephine, with whom she shared a love of music and singing, and spent time at the Kendall’s home. Rose and Henry became romantically involved and he and Rose subsequently became engaged. However, following a falling out between them in March 1867, Kendall married Charlotte Rutter, a year later. His marriage was apparently not a happy one and the references to Rose, by name and indirectly in subsequent poems evidenced the great, lost love of his life – “There is no passion like the first”.

Another connection between the two families was the commissioning by John Henniker Heaton of Kendall’s poem, “By the Cliff of the Sea” in memory of Samuel Bennett. The title alludes to Bennett’s final resting place, Waverley Cemetery.