Mark Gill

Mark Gill
Died	15 March 1879 Brisbane
Occupation	Publican
Years active	1865-1874
Known for	Britannia Hotel
Home town	Ballarat

Mark Gill was a publican in Ballarat, <1865-1874>.

History

In 1865, Gill was publican of the Britannia Hotel and paid £31 for a sales booth at the Dowling Forest races.

In November 1869 Gill was charged with Sunday trading (the hotel was not named):

Police v Mark Gill; this was a similar case of prosecution. The defendant said he was being persecuted, as he had been before the court only three weeks previously for the same offence. The police had passed other places, and had come to his. Sergeant Lamer said the police were bringing every person up that they found transgressing; defendant was fined 20s.

In October 1874 the newspapers carried an amazing story about Gill:

Attempt to Poison. The " Ballarat Post" gives the following recount of a strange affair :—Mr. Mark Gill, whose wife is the proprietress of the Britannia Hotel, Bridge street, has been recently confined to his bed from sickness. Under these circumstances Mrs. Gill engaged an old woman of fifty-three, named Mary Ann Clay, well-known in the East for her immoral associates, to administer comfort and watch over the sick husband. Mr. Gill's tale to the police is that on Tuesday night he lay in his bed unable to sleep from aches and pains, but the old woman, Mary Ann Clay, not being similarly afflicted, fell into an uneasy dose, in course of which the sufferer was horrified to hear her exclaim "No! No! I cannot poison him!—I will not poison him." The thought struck Mr. Gill at once that the remark applied to him, and seizing the old woman he woke her up, when she confessed that she had been employed by Mrs. Gill to poison her husband, and gave him a bottle containing the deadly mixture. Information was at once sent to the police, and Mary Ann Clay was conveyed to the lock-up, and charged at the court yesterday morning, before the mayor, that she did "feloniously attempt to administer a certain poison to one Mark Gill, with intent to murder him." The accused was remanded till to-day, and the bottle containing the fluid said to be poison was sent to Dr. Radcliffe for the purpose of being analysed.

A couple of days later, another story explained:

It is due to Mrs Mark Gill to say that the tale of attempted poisoning, told by her husband, appears to have been the outcome of a fit of the horrors merely. We have already said that it utterly broke down upon investigation, but we may add that it now appears to have been unworthy of the little credence given to it. We understand that Mrs Gill is about to take steps to obtain protection against any future freaks of her husband.

In spite of the story deserving "little credence" it was published in the Ballarat Evening Post, the Yorke Peninsula Advertiser and Miners' News, the Weekly Times, the Age, the Empire (Sydney), the Mount Alexander Mail, the Ovens and Murray Advertiser, and the Evening News (Sydney).

Gill died on 15 March 1879:

GILL —On the 15th March, in the Brisbane Hospital, Mr Mark Gill, late of the Britannia Hotel, Bridge street, of yellow jaundice.