Fake doctor Horace Dean, elected MP in 1857 by South Australia's Barossa Valley, undone by attack on G.F. Angas
Maurice Garland's book, Horace Dean: A pocketful of lies, details the American fake doctor, who practised medicine and became a megistrate at Angaston in the South Australia's Barossa Valley that twice elected him to South Australia's House of Assembly. Main image shows 19th Century Angaston, with the New Inn (later Barossa Hotel), at left, opened in 1851.
Main image courtesy State Library of South Australia
Horace Dean was an American fake doctor and army colonel who practised medicine in the South Australia’s Barossa Valley town of Angaston in the 1850s and was twice elected as a populist to the province’s House of Assembly.
Dean’s undoing and unmasking was to aim his populist attacks in Angaston at George Fife Angas, driving force in South Australia’s European settlement, who became owner of the land where Angaston (originally called German Pass) was settled.
Horace Dean was born in 1814 in Chicago, United States of America, probably son of Horace Williams who migrated from London with his mother, née Dean. He claimed an education in medicine but the diplomas he later exhibited weren’t acknowledged by Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, or St Louis School of Medicine, Missouri.
In 1846, Dean was a surgeon and cavalry captain in the American-Mexican war. He killed an officer in a duel and fled to England, spending months in a lunatic asylum. As Horace Dean in 1849 at Hastings he married Jane Ann Mitchell, and in November he arrived at Adelaide as surgeon on the Augusta.
With a forged medical diploma, Dean set up a medical practice in Angaston and, in 1850, was naturalised and admitted to South Australia’s qualified medical practitioners roll. He became a justice of the peace in 1851 and, next year, was an honorary special magistrate and then second stipendiary magistrate of the northern districts.
George Fife Angas was angered at reports that Dean had told the South Australian governor “that all in Angaston hated the landlord (Angas) and were afraid of him”. Angas wrote to friends in the United States of America who challenged Dean's identity and qualifications. Before governor Richard MacDonnell, in 1855, Dean allowed himself to be passed off as colonel Thomas Haskell. In reply, Jefferson Davis, the United States secretary of war, showed conclusively that this claim was false.
Claiming continuing “persecution” by Angas, Dean had to resign as magistrate in 1855 and was struck off the medical roll in 1857. Seeing it “necessary to remit these questions to the decision of the people”, he stood for the Barossa seat in the first House of Assembly elections. Candidate Dean professed contempt for all “would-be aristocrats'” who attempted “to monopolise the fat of the land”, and urged electors to “overwhelm the Upper House in its own ruins” if Angas attempted to “control the representatives of the people”.
Dean was elected in 1857 but disqualified in May by the court of disputed returns. He was reelected in June but again disqualified. He then proposed to start an “altogether democratic” newspaper but couldn’t find the money to launch it.
Dean went to Melbourne, then Sydney where he wrote for the Empire and in 1858 settled as a storekeeper at Tinonee on the Manning River. He practised medicine although he never registered in New South Wales. He encouraged attempts to grow sugar cane, cotton and tobacco and to mine for gold, copper and limestone. In 1865, he started the Manning River News and was elected in 1869 for the Hastings seat but was disqualified because he was in government pay as a postmaster.
In 1870, Dean was elected again by “the unanimous will of an outraged people” but again disqualified under naturalisation conditions. Still hoping to be elected, Dean proposed in 1872 to start a Sydney daily newspaper. When Henry Parkes refused to be his political editor, his enthusiasm waned.
After a short stay in Uralla, in 1875, Dean bought a store in Grafton and entered local politics. He became mayor in 1878 but was removed within six months for “gross mismanagement”. He was opposed in trying to stand again for parliament and retired to write an autobiography but a flood carried away his papers and ruined his store. He died in 1887.
