Gold rush casualty

The light was perfect for reading the grave markers in Newport churchyard this morning.
Elizabeth Griffith had already lost two of her sons when she died in 1855 at the age of 50.  David was  20 when he preceded her in 1850 and William only 18 when he lost his life 3 years later - at Bendigo Gold Diggings in Australia. The stark inscription cannot fail to capture the imagination: could this teenager from the small maritime town in West Wales have joined the gold rush to the other side of the world alone or did he accompany a friend or relative, his father even?  

From what I have learnt, Bendigo (now the major city of Sandhurst) was a remote sheep station when a bunch of shepherds, and two  married women, found gold in the creek in September 1851. For a while the discovery was kept quiet but once the news broke  the tiny settlement was swamped with prospectors and less than a year later 40,000 diggers had arrived forming a huge tent city. The first hospital was built in 1853 but whether young David Griffith  was a patient there or whether he died from illness or accident  out on the dusty plain  there is no clue.  

O, lift your eyes, ye sighing sons of men;
The long-fled golden age returns again.
See! youthful riches, with his yellow wand,
Touching the hills and valleys through the land - penned one of the early Bendigo prospectors.

Elizabeth's third son, John, drowned a year after his mother's death, at Morwhellam in Devon. By an ironic co-incidence this small port was also caught up in a frenzy of mineral extraction although in this case it was a copper rush that took it by storm in the mid-19th century.  Famed as 'the richest copper port in Queen Victoria's Empire', the queen herself visited in 1856. John was only 13 years old when he lost his life that summer and was buried at Tavistock. It seems reasonable to speculate he was on board a ship that sailed from his home town.

The grave marker finally records the passing of two daughters of Elizabeth and Thomas her husband (who is not buried here). Harriet and Margaret were 25 and 20 respectively when they died in February and November  1861.
So much tragedy so young cannot have made for happy lives.

I searched the database of the Bendigo Cemeteries Trust but it failed to come up with the name of William Griffith. I have emailed to enquire further.