Brewer, Henry

BREWER, Henry (1854–1895) was born in Liskeard, Cornwall, England, elder son of William Pearce Brewer, a lead and later tin miner, and Mary Thomas. Henry was trained in mining from a young age in Cornwall and the north of England, before working for John Taylor & Sons, mining engineers of London in the south of Spain. Subsequently he worked at the Sumburgh Mine, Shetland, and the Calacena Mines in the north of Spain before in 1880 returning to Cornwall where he married Elizabeth Ann Doidge at Calstock on 23^rd June. In 1881 he is listed as a mining captain and engineer at North Molton, Devon. Arriving in Queensland as a competent mining engineer, Brewer was on the Gympie goldfields by early 1883 where he supervised erection of the crushing plant for the Perseverance Gold-mining Co. In February 1884, although then in Brisbane, he advertised in the Gympie Times for employment on the goldfields. In July he was back in Gympie, and supervised reconstruction of an underground tank at the Tattersall’s Hotel. He joined the Pioneer Lodge at Gympie, in March 1885. Thereafter he worked as a mining and civil engineer, architect, and surveyor, calling tenders for buildings, designing a water supply for Gympie, corresponding with the Gympie Times on the merits of flat and round steel ropes and patenting a “Reliable” detaching hook. As consultant to the Municipal Council in 1891, Brewer was engineer for a dam on Deep Creek. In 1893, suffering ill health, probably pneumoconiosis, Brewer departed from Gympie hoping that a drier climate would assist his recovery. He moved to Charters Towers where he died in 1895.