Burstall, Thomas

BURSTALL, Thomas(1807-1883) was born in London, second son of Timothy Burstall (1776-1860), a civil engineer, and his first wife, Charlotte Radwell who died in 1818. Timothy Burstall of Leith (the port of Edinburgh), was a pioneer in locomotive construction, lodging early patents (with John Reed Hill of London) for steam road carriages in 1824 and 1826. In 1829 their locomotive Perseverance was a competitor in the Rainhill Trials, a competition to find a locomotive for the pioneering Liverpool and Manchester Railway then approaching completion. Damaged enroute to the Trials, Perseverance competed only on the final day of six but was awarded a consolation prize. The winner was George and Robert Stephenson’s Rocket. Thomas probably trained with either John Hill or his father with whom he was later in partnership as Timothy Burstall & Son, engineers and machine makers of Phoenix Engine Works, Leith, until the business became insolvent in 1838. By then Thomas had married Elizabeth Evans in London in 1835, their three eldest children were born at Leigh and Edinburgh. In 1842 they were living at Clack, Wiltshire with Thomas listed as a civil engineer; in 1844-6 in London and thereafter in Birmingham, Warwickshire where he was associated with brickmaking. After his father’s death in November 1860, he was working at Liverpool in 1861 but in November that year, the whole family embarked for Australia. After arriving in Sydney in May 1862, they moved to Rockhampton, still prosperous in the aftermath of the Canoona gold rush and with settlers attracted to Queensland as a new colony. Burstall succeeded EJ SMITH as Town Surveyor occupying the contentious position until 1867 and serving also as superintendent of the Volunteer Fire Brigade. In 1866 he was in partnership with John HORNBY as HORNBY & BURSTALL, architects, and engineering surveyors of Rockhampton. Later moving to Port Denison, Burstall supervised installation of crushing machinery at the Iron Duke copper mine in July 1869. He died in Brisbane on 8 June 1883. An obituary in Rockhampton’s Capricornian, observed that Burstall deserved better treatment as Town Surveyor. He designed the main drain, breakwater and wharf approaches and his plans for the waterworks were superior to the arrangement in place twenty years later.