People Australia

Agnes Mary Matilda Benham, née Nesbit  (1850-1932) humanist, socialist and feminist

Birth: 3 December 1950 in Adelaide, South Australia, daughter of English-born parents Edward Planta Nesbit (1822-1900) a schoolmaster, from Lambeth, Surrey, and his first wife Ann, née Pariss (1819-1854), from Westminster, London. Marriage: 21 April 1870 in her father’s house at North Adelaide to John James Benham (1835-1919), an English-born land-broker. They had one daughters and two sons, one of whom, John Victor Veysey Benham (b.1871) died in Western Australia in 1899. Death: 7 March 1932 at Queen Victoria Hospital, Melbourne, Victoria. 

• From a family with radical connections, “Agnes was part of a small, freethinking circle in Adelaide”, She spoke at the Adelaide Democratic Club and wrote for the labour press.
• She was an ardent advocate of sex reform.
• In February 1902 she helped to found and was a member of the board of the South Australian Co-Operative Clothing Co.
• Influenced by Tom Mann, she was co-founder of and leading activist in the Clarion Fellowship of Socialists (established Adelaide, 1902).
• Agnes and her daughter Rosamond, a prominent medical practitioner, were living together in Perth, Western Australia, in 1903 and at Stannary Hills, Queensland in 1913.
• She lived at Silvan, South Wandin, Victoria in 1909 and in 1914-1917, when her occupation was described in the electoral rolls as “fruit growing”.
• From the 1920s she lived with family members in Melbourne, for a time at the Kew Asylum where her daughter Rosamond Agnes Benham (1871-1899) was a doctor and her son Clarence Booth Benham (1876-1949) was manager.
• Cause of death: senility (months) and cardiac failure (weeks).
• Her son Clarence Booth Benham (1876-1949) a sea diver, journalist and author, served in the Australian Imperial Force in World War I, as did her adopted son Rosmond Victor Benham, né Campbell (1898-1982), who later became an orchardist at Silvan.
• Her granddaughter Lalage Rosamond Agnes Benham, formerly Taylor (1904-1990) was a medical practitioner in Melbourne and London, England. 

Sources
Verity Burgmann, In our Time: Socialism and the Rise of Labor, 1885-1905, (Sydney, 1985).