The Dixson Family Were Great Australian Philanthropists, But Their Wealth Was Built On Slave Labour

(MENAFN- The Conversation) The barque Glenswilly arrived in Sydney Harbour from Greenock, outside Glasgow, on October 29 1839. Among the new arrivals were Hugh Dixson , his wife Helen, and their infant son, also named Hugh.

At 29 years old, Hugh Dixson had been in business as an Edinburgh tobacco manufacturer and retailer for a decade. He came to Sydney, according to the standard story, to evade high excise duties on tobacco in Scotland, and possibly at the urging of the immigration reformer and pillar of the Sydney Scottish community Reverend John Dunmore Lang .

Hugh Dixson (1810-1880). Public domain, Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales

Upon his arrival, Dixson set up a tobacco shop in George Street and sent home for a large containment of pipes.

A dour Baptist and the second son of a baker, Dixson was to become one of the most successful tobacconists in colonial New South Wales. The tobacco business made his family immensely wealthy. They used their riches to make major contributions to the development of Australia's educational, scientific, medical, cultural, religious and media institutions.

What was rarely acknowledged was that these contributions were made possible by the exploitation of people largely unknown and unnamed half a world away.

A tainted inheritance

The Dixson family's wealth was built on the institution of chattel slavery in the American South, and later on the racialised economic exploitation that succeeded emancipation. Their tobacco came mainly from Virginia, the major region of American tobacco production, which prior to the Civil War relied on enslaved labour, both in the fields and in its factories.

A complex supply chain – including growers, manufacturers, agents and dealers – makes it difficult to trace the origins of the Dixsons' tobacco exactly. But it appears to have come mainly from the area around Lynchburg, on the James River in central Virginia. From there it was sent to Richmond, where the raw leaf was treated before being exported.

In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the workforce of the Richmond tobacco factories was made up almost entirely of enslaved people, including children, and a few white overseers. Around half of these workers were owned by the manufacturers, with the other half hired out from surrounding plantations.

The Civil War brought legal freedom for the formerly enslaved. But as historians of reconstruction have long recognised, the postbellum world was organised in ways that greatly constrained the economic and practical liberties of most of the newly emancipated.

Photos compiled by author and activist W.E.B. Du Bois for the 1900 American Negro Exposition in Paris show a workforce that is still almost entirely Black at the factory of T.C. Williams Co., one of the largest Richmond tobacco manufacturers.

Workers at T.C. Williams & Co., Richmond, Virginia – W.E.B. Du Bois (c.1899) Public domain, Library of Congress

The Dixson firm was then in business with T.C. Williams Co. and it is probable that Hugh Dixson senior was purchasing from Williams' predecessor, James Thomas Jr., prior to emancipation.

The Dixsons were well versed in the intricacies of Virginian tobacco production. Hugh Dixson's son Robert is the clearest witness to this knowledge. In the 1870s and 1880s, he wrote a series of pamphlets and newspaper articles about tobacco growing and manufacture. In one pamphlet , he explicitly refers to the violence the“old Virginia growers” used to mete out to enslaved people who were insufficiently careful to rid crops of tobacco worms.

These days, companies minimise the visibility of their products' origins. Contemporary clothing brands that buy from Bangladeshi sweatshops or tech companies that source hardware from Chinese factories with troubling labour practices do not advertise these facts. Innocuous country-of-origin labels hide a multitude of sins.

But things were different then. Racialised imagery showing images of Africans, African Americans and Native Americans was ubiquitous in 19th-century tobacco branding and advertising. It highlighted rather than concealed the labour conditions of tobacco's origins.

One Dixson trademark from 1869 features an illustration of a set of barrels labelled“long Virginia strips”. A naked, dark-skinned man sits astride one of the barrels, holding a pipe and a tobacco leaf.

The celebrated Dixson's Twist (1869). Public domain, State Library of Victoria The Dixson dynasty

When Hugh Dixson died in Darlinghurst in November 1880, the Australian Town and Country Journal remembered him as“a genial-hearted man, benevolently inclined”, who“took an active interest in most charitable institutions and philanthropic operations”.

Life in Sydney had not started out smoothly. Over the 1840s and 1850s, Dixson weathered the ups and downs of business and family life. Baby Hugh died soon after the family's arrival. A second son was born in 1841. He was also christened Hugh. In all, Hugh and Helen Dixson would have ten children, of whom only five – four sons and a daughter – survived infancy.

By the 1850s, in addition to the George Street shop, Dixson had a small tobacco factory in the Sydney suburb of Newtown. He held interests in another factory in Maitland, and in a steam ship, the Sir John Harvey.

The family's middling fortunes improved dramatically in the 1860s as a result of changes to the New South Wales import tariffs on tobacco. In 1862, Dixson built a new factory in Wynyard Lane, Sydney. When the business outgrew the premises, it moved to a larger factory in York Street, then to Castlereagh Street. Eventually, associated businesses would be opened in Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Fremantle.

In July 1864, with the American Civil War still raging, Hugh Dixson's two eldest surviving sons, Hugh and Robert, then both in their early twenties, were made partners in the family business, which became Dixson & Sons. In 1869, Robert moved to Melbourne to expand the firm's operations.

The following year, Robert and his father quarrelled over the direction of the company and they severed their business relations. The new Robert Dixson & Co. became a rival firm. Robert later established another factory in Adelaide, where he served a term as a member of the South Australian parliament.

When Hugh senior died in 1880, he left the Sydney business to his eldest son, Hugh junior. Robert was left out of the will.

Women sorting tobacco at T.C. Williams & Co., Richmond, Virginia – W.E.B. Du Bois (c.1899). Public domain, Library of Congress. A philanthropic legacy

The family tradition of philanthropy began with Hugh senior and was continued by his children and grandchildren.

The Dixson patriarch was a director of the Randwick Asylum for Destitute Children and a Justice of the Peace. Younger generations of Dixsons would be celebrated for their substantial philanthropic benefactions. Three members of the family received knighthoods for their public contributions.

Sir Hugh Dixson , as Hugh junior became, and his wife Emma donated generously to many institutions and projects. Beneficiaries included Sydney University and the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. The couple also donated the land and the bulk of the building costs for the Petersham Baptist Church.

Lady Emma Dixson c.1901-1910. C. Vandyke/State Library of New South Wales. Public domain.

Medical causes especially benefited, many of them in connection with Sir Hugh's younger brother, Thomas Storie Dixson, lecturer in materia medica and therapeutics – that is, pharmacology – at the University of Sydney, and later president of the Australian Museum.

A major gift of £20,000 went to the New South Wales Home for Incurables in Ryde, which still exists today as a private disability support and rehabilitation centre.

Emma was the co-founder – with Julia Carlile Fox, one of the earliest women doctors in New South Wales – of the Sydney Medical Mission, which provided medical care in Sydney's poorest inner suburbs.

Emma Dixson died in 1922. Upon Sir Hugh's death in 1926, his estate was valued at more than £140,000, around $13 million in today's money .

Dixson & Sons' tobacco works on the corner of Elizabeth and Park Streets, Sydney, was built in 1883 by Hugh Dixson junior. State Library of New South Wales/Public domain A different cloth

Robert Dixson was cut from a different cloth. He was a violent alcoholic. In the years leading up to his death, he was often absent in Europe. When he was around, he terrorised his family.

When he died in London in 1891, Robert left his estate, valued at between £30,000 and £40,000, to Melbourne University for scholarships in science, mathematics and engineering. This bequest – his major institution-building contribution – was a calculated act of spite directed at his estranged wife Ruth.

Ruth and several of the couple's children objected. They claimed Robert had been suffering alcoholic delusions and was not of testamentary capacity. Following nine days of court arguments, including three days of damning testimony from Ruth about her abusive husband, lawyers for the family and the University agreed to split the estate.

After costs were deducted and debts paid, the University received a total of £10,837. The Faculty of Science still awards the Dixson scholarship today.

Sir William Dixson (1870-1952). domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Dixson family's philanthropy continued into the next generation. Sir Hugh's son, Sir William Dixson , is remembered as a major collector of Australiana. He was a key benefactor of the State Library of New South Wales.

The Dixson Collection and Galleries at the Library, named in his honour, contain extensive collections of colonial-era publications, manuscripts, maps, coins, stamps, paintings and photographs – all crucial resources for research into Australian history.

The Dixson Library opened in 1959. Sir William's contributions included the Mitchell Library's distinctive bronze doors , three stained-glass windows in the reading room, and £15,000.

In 1937-39, Sir William also donated a modest but foundational £5,000 to the New England University College of the University of Sydney, now the University of New England. Its Dixson Library is named in his honour.

From 1929 and 1935, Sir William and his brother Robert Craig Dixson also gifted around £7,800 to the University of Sydney for research into atomic stability.

Another Hugh

Another Hugh, eldest son of the dissolute Robert, sought to avoid the confusion of being yet another prominent Hugh Dixson. In 1907, he changed his surname by deed poll to Denison. He was knighted in 1923, becoming Sir Hugh Denison .

Raised in Melbourne and Adelaide, Denison moved to Sydney in 1905. In Sydney and subsequently in Melbourne, he founded or took over a series of morning, evening and Sunday newspapers. These included the Sydney Sun, predecessor of the Sunday Sun-Herald, and the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial, predecessor of the Herald Sun.

Denison's Sydney Sun employed a young Keith Murdoch, father of Rupert, as Melbourne political correspondent.

Sir Hugh Denison (1865-1940) in 1901, when he was still named Dixson. domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In the 1930s, Denison founded Macquarie Broadcasting Services, now part of Nine Entertainment, which controlled 15 commercial radio stations, including Sydney's 2GB.

Like his uncle Sir Hugh, Denison supported the Dreadnought fund for British emigration. He also supported the Australian Red Cross Society and gifted the Royal Empire Society (now the Royal Commonwealth Society) £25,000 and a building for its New South Wales branch headquarters.

Denison died in 1940, leaving part of a vast estate to St Paul's College at the University of Sydney. Income from the bequest helped fund the construction of the Denison wing of this most prestigious of Australian higher education establishments.

Reckoning with a violent legacy

In recent years, many institutions in wealthy Western countries have begun to grapple with the legacies of their historic entanglement with slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.

Australian institutions have been slower to engage, though the emergence, in the wake of the Uluru Statement from the Heart , of institutional truth-telling processes opens space to reckon with the effects of settler-colonialism on Indigenous peoples as part of the wider global history of racialised colonial violence.

It remains a common assumption that, in the words of former prime minister Scott Morrison ,“there was no slavery in Australia”. That Morrison's claim is factually incorrect is only half the point. Slavery did take place on Australian shores, but it did not need to for it to factor crucially in Australian history.

Flows of capital and goods do not stop at national borders. There was limited historic slavery within the British Isles themselves, but the role of Caribbean slavery in building much of Britain's wealth and many of its institutions is hardly in contention.

After chattel slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, the state paid out an unprecedented £20 million in compensation (at least £1.2 billion in today's money ) – not to the formerly enslaved, but to former slave-owners to offset the loss of their“property”. Much of this wealth left Britain and spread throughout the Empire as capital reinvested in expansions of colonial settlement.

In a process whose details we are only just beginning to understand, the compensation funds played a critical role in the acceleration of Australian settlement from the late 1830s.

Former Caribbean slave-owners, or their sons, suddenly alienated from West Indian society as its economic and social structures changed fundamentally around them – but financially liquid from the compensation payouts – moved on to new pastures, including Australia. They became prominent settlers, colonisation advocates, pastoralists and colonial governors.

The expansion of Australian settler-colonialism was intimately connected with histories of slavery, anti-slavery and imperial policy in the Caribbean and Britain. As historian Jane Lydon puts it in Anti-Slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land? :“Indigenous people in the settler colonies ultimately bore the cost of ending Caribbean slavery.”

The Dixsons were neither slave-owners, nor compensation recipients. Their business interests flowed across and beyond the Empire, rather than along its grain. But they worked within a wider commercial network that exploited enslaved people and coercive post-emancipation labour regimes. By enmeshing their businesses with the economy of the American South, the Dixsons drew upon the fruits of slavery for a quarter century after its abolition in the British Empire.

The extraction of this wealth from enslaved people helped build Australian universities, libraries, scientific and medical facilities, newspapers, radio stations and churches. Today, many of these institutions still serve students, researchers, patients, customers and congregations.

Their histories tell a story in which they appear as the products and beneficiaries of the racialised exploitation of interconnected global capital. Reckonings with these histories await.

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