Leading the way
They descended from George Berkeley Hewson, born in Hackney, London in 1804 and educated at Merchant Taylors’ School. He became a prominent ships’ chandler at the British Naval Base in Simonstown, Cape of Good Hope, in the 1830s.
There he married Sarah Miller in 1840. They had four sons, two of whom grew up in trades associated with shipping. Sometime after 1856, when their youngest son Joseph Caurier Hewson (born 1854), died at 15 months in Cape Town, George and Sarah moved to Victoria to follow the latest gold rush. George was killed when a mine pit collapsed on him.
The eldest son, Clarence Joslin Hewson (born 1841), became a shipwright in Simonstown. He moved to Auckland in 1866 where he carried on
