Edward James Hinder ran his ‘Family and Dispensing Chemist’ between Cowper and Francis streets ‘opposite the Council Chambers’ from 1876 until his untimely death at the age of 30.  He lived with his family on the premises, by the late 1880s numbered as 33 Glebe Road. 

 Edward was born on 1 October 1852, the oldest of eight children, at Pitt Town where his father taught at the school attached to St James Church of England.  By 1858 he and his two-year-old brother Robert John had moved to his father’s new posting at the school of Kelso Holy Trinity Church.  Aged seven he was unofficially adopted by his greatuncle ‘Captain’ Edward Hinder and went to live with him and his wife – aged in their sixties – at Drayton House, a two-storey stone mansion set in nine acres with an orchard, on Balmain Road Leichhardt.  His brother Robert later joined him there and the two boys attended Sydney Grammar.

Born in Sydney, Captain Hinder had spent 32 years with the East India Company, based in Calcutta.  In 1822 he married Indian-born Ann Harper, blind for much of her life.  Always carrying a large bunch of keys, Ann controlled Drayton and its servants, choosing by touch the best linen and clothes for the boys who took trips with her into town in the family’s dogcart.  The Hinders had landed in Sydney in early 1849 aboard the Fanny from Calcutta via Adelaide accompanied by two children.  According to family tradition the couple were childless.  As they had frequent visitors from Calcutta (including 27-year-old Ann Archibald Hinder Ross, ‘daughter of a gentleman’, who died at Drayton House in 1861), their charges may have been other relatives or the children of friends.

At age 14 Edward was apprenticed to a German chemist and at 23 was running his own business.  By 1876, the year he married Elizabeth Helah Bubb, he had opened the Glebe Dispensary, selling ‘patent medicines, perfumery and toilet requisites’.  He took on another brother Selwyn Hedley as an apprentice.  His neighbours were William Hodges, poulterer, and J Bardsley and Co, grocers, drapers and ironmongers.  A fellow druggist was James Dole, on the opposite side of Glebe Road between Parramatta Road and Derby Place.  Edward was a Mason (Glebe Lodge No. 1944) and a member of the Glebe Union Branch (No. 2011) of the Grand United Order of Oddfellows Friendly Society.  He died of appendicitis at home on 28 May 1883 leaving a son Herbert, born in

1877, and a daughter Gertrude (1878 -1910).  Another daughter, Muriel, had died aged nine weeks in 1881.  His widow, who did not remarry, outlived her husband by nearly 47 years until 1930.  In 1885 Gilbert E Vaughan was the chemist at number 33 (he moved to 149 Glebe Road) and in 1886-7 Herbert A Hawkens.  From 1888-91 the shop was managed by T M J Goldrick with Mrs Hinder as proprietor.  Whether she was Edward’s widow (who moved to Burton Street and later to Paddington) or Selwyn’s wife is uncertain.

This family’s ancestry in Australia dates from the arrival in 1790 of the NSW Corps with the Second Fleet.  Private John Hinder in 1801 married Ann Fogg and had three sons:

(Captain) Edward, John and James. John snr transferred to the 73rd regiment which was sent to Ceylon where he died of cholera in 1819.  Ann and the children made their way to Calcutta.  John jnr (1804-32) joined the East India Company, married a widow Ann Cooper née Cook with two sons, and fathered Edward Robert and James.  The former was the father of Glebe chemist Edward James; the latter died of cholera in Calcutta at the age of 23.

Glebe Road from St Johns  Road was sketched,  Edward Hinder’s dispensary was open for business just beyond the steam tram on the left hand side.  The spire of the Presbyterian Church, relocated to Bridge  Road in 1927, can be seen in the distance on Parramatta Road.
Glebe Road from St Johns
Road was sketched,
Edward Hinder’s dispensary was open for business just beyond the steam tram on the left hand side. The spire of the Presbyterian Church, relocated to Bridge
Road in 1927, can be seen in the distance on Parramatta Road.
Author’s note to Hinder family historians.
I have a good deal of material on Edward Robert (1829-94) and his other children Robert John (18561918), Alfred Charles Cooper (1858- 1936) who served time in prison, Lydia Sophia (1860-1951), Selwyn Hedley (1861-1925), Arthur George Allan (1863-95), Henry Vincent Critchley (1865-1913) whose son and daughter-in-law were artists Frank and Margel Hinder, and William Thomas Septimus (1868-1941).