Remembering John Ifield

Some criminals transported to Australia seem to us today to have committed relatively minor offences and many were first time offenders. John Ifield was not one of these. In fact, he managed to receive not one but two sentences of transportation for seven years.

John  was the son of Robert, a blacksmith and freeman, and Elizabeth Ifield and was baptised in Hythe on 14 June 1801. He had three younger siblings.   The rest of the family appear to have lead quiet and respectable lives. His brother Robert had the licence of the King’s Head in Hythe for a time (1) and his mother ended her days as an inmate of St John’s Hospital in Hythe, an almshouse which required its inhabitants to be ‘of good character’. (2)

John worked as a labourer but by the time he was twenty-two he was supplementing his income with thieving, although judging by the number of times he was caught, he was not very adept at it . In 1823 he was sentenced to twelve months in prison for larceny. In July 1825, he got nine months for another larceny when he stole a woollen shawl from Richard Boddington. In 1826, he stole three ‘drawers’ from the storehouse of Mackeson’s brewery and nine shilling pieces from Edward Dray. The magistrates’ patience had come to an end, even if he was the son of a freeman. He was sentenced to seven years transportation.

By this time, actual transportation depended on the needs of the receiving colony and on the health and character of the prisoner. Unruly and physically strong men were shipped out as soon as possible; others might, at the discretion of the officers and surgeon, be allowed to serve their sentence on the hulks. This is what happened to John. These sentences were divided into three periods, each decreasing in severity, but all included labour ashore, including loading and unloading vessels, construction and repairs, re-painting ships, cleaning cables and scraping shot.

Conditions were grim. On board the Justitia moored at Woolwich between 1830–1855 prisoners slept in groups in tiered bunks. Each had an average sleeping space of 5 feet 10 inches long by 18 inches wide. Weekly rations consisted of biscuits and pea soup, accompanied once a week by half an ox-cheek and twice a week, by porridge, a lump of bread and cheese. None of the ships had adequate quarantine facilities and there was an ongoing contamination risk caused by the flow of excrement from the sick bays.(2)

A typical prison hulk

John was originally imprisoned on the hulk Retribution at Sheerness, but was transferred to the Ganymede at Chatham on 6 Sept 1826. It had originally been the French frigate Hébé captured in 1809. He served nearly seven years, being released on 10 April 1833 under a free pardon which indicated that the sentence of transportation had lapsed.

He managed to keep out of trouble for the next four years, but in 1837 he was charged with stealing a pig worth twenty shillings, the property of Thomas Laws at Newington-next-Hythe . At the East Kent Quarter Sessions on 3 January 1838, he pleaded guilty and was again sentenced to seven years .

This time, either New South Wales was in need of labour or John was not judged fit to remain on the hulks. He was transported to Australia on board the Bengal Merchant on 24 March 1838. In Australia, he seems to have behaved himself and got his ticket of leave in September 1842, by which time he was described as a collar and harness maker and was living in Illawarra, New South Wales.  The area had been cleared by settlers using convict labour and  used for dairy farming.

Illawarra before it was ‘cleared’…

… and afterwards

Seventeen years later, in May 1859 John was recorded as living in the Electoral District of Narellan.  It was a small, but steadily growing town where plots of land were being sold off. Perhaps John had finally settled down to a regular (and legal) way of life.

Nothing further is known of his life, but…

Ifield is an uncommon name in England, even more so in Australia. It is, of course, best known for being the surname of a yodelling singer from New South Wales, especially popular in the sixties after the success of his single ‘I Remember You’.

Is there a connection?

1. 1. Kent Archives H1431
   2. Kent Archives EK/2008/2/Book 13 1853
   3. Philip Atherton: Life inside the prison hulks: Staying alive.

Three Marys

On 2 February 1815, a young Irishwoman approached the Hythe Overseer of the Poor, George Scott. Her name, she said, was Jane Harris and she was the wife of George Harris, a soldier in the 95th Regiment, and the mother of his five children. George had been sent overseas, to America and had not left her any means of support. She showed him a document , which proved all she said and asked him for money to get her and the children to Dover, where she had friends who would help her.

George Scott had no reason to doubt her. Many soldiers left their families unsupported when they were posted and he knew that the 95th, the Green Jackets, were constantly on the move. He gave her six shillings and sixpence.

Shortly afterwards, however, he was told that a party of ‘vagrants’ was in town and using false documents and that his ‘Jane Harris’ was one of them. He found her at the Duke’s Head inn, in company with two other women, Mary Welch and Mary Davis, and several children.

The Duke’s Head in Hythe, empty now for some years…

Scott then went and searched the yard of another public house in Hythe, the King’s Head, and found a quantity of stolen printed forms for emergency passes, mostly issued by the City of Canterbury.

and the King’s Head, still thriving

He said later he had been ‘acting on information.’ The information came from Mary Davis.  She really was the wife of a soldier, but had fallen in with the group and subsequently fallen out with them and was now getting her revenge. She also told Scott that it was Mary Welch who was the organiser of the scam. It was she who supplied the documents but not the one presenting -‘uttering’ – them, so she was at one remove from the offence. Presumably she also got a cut of the ‘takings’.

‘Jane Harris’, whose real name was Mary Supple, was arrested, along with Mary Welch, who had been wanted for some time by Bow Street police in London. Both women were committed to Hythe Town gaol. In fact the fraud had been going on across the county. Only weeks before the Hythe arrests, another woman was detained in Rochester for exactly the same trick, but using the name of Easterwood. She was sentenced to seven years transportation, and that was the sentence Mary Supple received, too, from the Hythe magistrates. Mary Davis gave evidence for the prosecution. Of the organiser, Mary Welch, there is no further trace after she was sent to London for trial.

Mary Supple had been born in County Cork in about 1791 and had married Patrick Beehan, though whether he was at this stage alive or dead we do not know. They had a child together, another Patrick, born in 1813 in Ireland. Little Patrick was with Mary when she was arrested and was transported with her in July 1815. They sailed on board the ship Mary Anne along with ninety-nine other women convicts for New South Wales, arriving on 19 January 1816 – this was an unusually long voyage.

Between 1788 and1852, about twenty-four thousand women were transported to Australia. Some of these, until about 1820, were given their ticket of leave on arrival – if they had either money or a recommendation from the ship’s captain.  The others were sent to The Female Factory at Parramatta, a squalid loft above a gaol.

We don’t know which of these happened to Mary, but she had the very good sense to find herself protection early on.  She married, or perhaps co-habited  with, James Nugent, another convict who had been sentenced to twenty-one years in 1811 for highway robbery. A single convict woman in New South Wales was incredibly vulnerable and regarded by the authorities, other convicts and free settlers alike as  fair game for abuse and exploitation.

Mary  worked as a launderess and she and James had three children: James,  Mary and Thomas.

She died in 1830, but all her children, including her first, Patrick, survived childhood and married and had children of their own and lived long lives. Their descendants still live in Australia.

 

 

The Mills of God Grind Slow…

One fine Saturday morning in September 1809, twenty-one-year-old Thomas Ashley of Hythe rode into Canterbury cattle market leading ‘four fine heifers, about half fat ‘and offered them for sale to Edward Norwood, a slaughterhouse owner, for eighty guineas.  Some haggling took place, as was usual, and Thomas agreed on £60 and went to the nearby Flying Horse inn to await payment.

 

The Flying Horse Inn in Canterbury, still trading today

Edward Norwood took a closer look at his new beasts. They were sweating and had clearly been brought to market in a hurry. He was suspicious of Thomas’s ready acceptance of a price well below their value, which was about £72.  He took him into custody – presumably with the help of some others, and had him brought before the mayor, who also acted as a magistrate.  Thomas explained that on the previous day, he had been fishing near Dymchurch when  a well-dressed man approached him and asked him to take four heifers to Canterbury market the next morning. He was told to meet another man at the Drum inn at Stanford or on nearby Hampton Hill (near Farthing Common) early in the morning. Thomas duly found the man, called only John, on a hog-maned chestnut pony at Hampton Hill. He was given the mount and the beasts and set off as instructed.

Hampton Hill, now called Hempton Hill

The mayor did not believe him, and given the presence in the story of not one but two mysterious strangers, that is not surprising. Further enquiries revealed that the heifers were in fact the property of Mr Quihampton of Pedlinge, near Hythe and that they had been stolen on Friday night.  As the offence was committed within the liberty of Hythe, Thomas was sent for trial there and also accused of stealing the hog-maned pony from George Pilcher’s stable in Hythe and a pair of boots belonging to John Brazier from another stable, as well as some other items of clothing. Presumably he wanted to look the part when he went to market.

He was incarcerated in Hythe gaol to await trial at the next Sessions, which would be in January. He did himself no favours while in gaol by boasting that he had committed other crimes which he had got away with. Once in court, on 6 January 1810, evidence showed that he was guilty.

Horse theft was a common crime, but carried the death penalty and Thomas had stolen valuable livestock, too. The bench sentenced him to death, but still felt uneasy, as they had not been obliged to pass a death sentence for many years.  The recorder, Mr Boteler, wrote to the Home Secretary asking whether the ‘limited jurisdiction’ of Hythe would afford any grounds for mercy.  He elaborated, as required, on Thomas’s background:  he was strong and healthy but ‘he has always borne a bad character’; his parents were still alive and still in Hythe and while his mother, Mary,  was of good character, his father, another Thomas, was of ‘indifferent’ reputation.The King, George IV, decided to extend his ‘Grace and Mercy’ on condition of Thomas  ‘being transported to the coast of New South Wales for the term of his natural life’.

On 24 February 1810, Thomas arrived on board the ss Zealand, a prison hulk moored at Sheerness. It accommodated over four hundred and fifty convicts. He was recorded there as being five feet five inches tall with blue eyes which were weak – presumably he had poor eyesight. He was given a set of coarse ‘slop clothing’: a jacket, waistcoat and canvas breeches; two shirts; a pair of shoes; a handkerchief, belt and two blankets. To set off the ensemble he was locked into a set of leg irons.

He was there  for over a year and did not sail until 11 April 1811 on board the ss Admiral Gambier  to New South Wales. The voyage was now quicker than it had been in the earliest days of transportation, as ships did not need to carry supplies for their destination and he probably sailed to Rio and then round Cape Horn. The food was coarse but sufficient, except for the lack of greens and the convicts were given a mixture of lime juice, sugar and vinegar to ward off scurvy. The ship reached its destination, New South Wales, on 29 Sept 1811, almost exactly two years after Thomas’s crime was committed.

We know nothing about his early days in the new colony, but sometime after 1823 he became a miller at Carters’ Barracks in Sydney.The barracks was built in 1819 to house convict carters working on the brickfields.  As there were no beasts of burden, chain gangs of twelve convicts drew the brick carts (weighing three quarters of a tonne) over a kilometre to the settlement in Sydney Cove, nine times as day. Perhaps Thomas did this work – he was, after all, strong and healthy and still young. In 1823, two treadmills were installed at Carters’ Barracks and used for the next twenty-five years. One was worked by thirty-six men, the other by twenty.

                                                              Carter’s Barracks in Sydney, front view…

…and the yard at the back

Treadmills in English prisons were rarely productive and used solely for the purpose of providing ‘hard labour’. These, however, were actually used for grinding corn, and produced forty bushels a day. Sydney’s sandstone was too soft to use for millstones, so they were imported from England and became one of the most valuable pieces of equipment in the colony. Presumably, since the hard work of grinding was done by other convicts, it was Thomas’s job to maintain the machinery and process the ground meal.  He worked for a master named Lyndsay.

The treadmill at Carter’s Barracks

Thomas got his ticket of leave in 1835 (1) and was now allowed to live where he wished, but was required to  remain in the  employment of Carters’ Barracks treadmill.  His new-found relative freedom was hard for him to deal with and his Ticket was revoked in December 1839 for ‘repeated drunkenness’ (2).  He cleaned up his act and got it back again in 1841 and then seems to have kept out of trouble, as he was allowed to live and work in Yass , three hundred kilometres from Sydney,  on 17 Sept 1845 (3).  A steam mill had opened there in 1842.  Five years later, he moved on to Queanbayam and it was here that he got his Conditional Pardon  on 31 Dec 1847 (4). Convicts with a life sentence could never get a Free Pardon.

He had not long to relish his long-awaited freedom and died on 26 Sep 1848 after nearly forty years servitude (5).

1. New South Wales Archives 4/4100; Reel 923
2.  New South Wales Archives 4/4111; Reel 927
3.  New South Wales Archives 4/4128; Reel 932
4.  New South Wales Archives 4/4454; Reel 785
5. New South Wales Archives 4/4549; Reel 690

With thanks to Mike de la Mare for the map

 

John Price’s New Year’s Celebration

John Price was born in Hythe in 1810 and became a harness-maker in the town. It was a skilled trade which would have left him, as a single man, with a little cash left over at the end of the working week.

On New Years Eve 1833, he decided to spend some of this hard-earned money and took himself to London to see in the New Year.  Once there, he somehow fell in company with another young man, twenty-year-old William Butler, a bricklayer. Butler later said that John asked him to go to Merton with him, which they did, returning the next day.  During the return journey, they continued their celebrations in the time-honoured way, by putting away a lot of alcohol.

The pair then went to an eating-house near the Surrey Theatre in Blackfriars Road where they met a young woman already known to Butler, Mary Cooper.  They all had something to eat, and some more to drink, and then Mary  Cooper took them both to her lodgings in Jeffreys Buildings in Westminster. She and John then went to bed together, though John had passed out by 10.30pm.

The almonry, Westminster, the site of Jeffreys Buildings

Mary Ann Morgan lived in the same building and when she came home that night was told by Butler that he had a ‘flat’ in Mary Cooper’s room – the term means a person who is easily deceived, a patsy or sucker we might say today.  Mary Ann and Butler put their heads together and hatched a plan.

Mary Ann went to Mary Cooper’s room and the two women sat chatting on the bed while John snored. Butler came in, too, and said that he would take John’s greatcoat and jacket for safe keeping.  To be absolutely sure that they were safe, he would give them to his friend, Henry Harber, who would return them the next day.

John woke up at about three o’clock the next morning and even in his befuddled state, noticed that his clothes were missing. He did not believe his new friends when they told him that his things were being kept safe and went off in search of a policeman, whom he soon found – one Constable Suttle. Suttle went back to the house with him, heard the story and did not believe it either. He arrested both women and Butler.  Butler protested that his own coat had been stolen too. Unimpressed, Constable Suttle took them to the police station and put them in the cells, but at this point Mary Ann Morgan broke down and confessed that she and Butler were supposed to meet Henry Harber, who really did have the clothing,  at the Duke of York’s monument  that morning and they would, together, sell the items. The clothing was worth five pounds, a decent sum, and in one of the pockets was the bonus of a handkerchief worth two shillings.

The intrepid constable made his way to the monument, at the junction of Regent Street and The Mall and sure enough found Henry Harber sitting on the steps, wearing John’s clothes over his own. The handkerchief was round his neck . Suttle arrested him, too. Harber, a nineteen-year-old labourer,  was only a short young man, five feet nothing tall, so we must assume John was a lot larger.

The Duke of York’s monument and steps today

At the magistrates court the next day, 3 January, Mary Cooper, Mary Ann Morgan and William Butler were charged with stealing John’s clothes; Henry Harber was charged with receiving stolen goods. Mary Cooper, who had only taken John to bed, was discharged; Mary Ann Morgan was admitted King’s evidence and the men remanded to stand trial.

John went back to Hythe, but the case was widely reported in the press, including in Kent, under headlines such as ‘A Caution to Countrymen’. Hythe is a small town and news travels fast. Everyone must have known the rather sordid details of his New Year’s holiday. He did not even get his clothes back, as they were kept as evidence. Then the case was heard at the Old Bailey and John, of course, had to appear as prosecutor, a daunting experience for a young man unused either to the big city or to the grandeur of the most important court in the country.

Inside the Old Bailey

Butler and Harber were found guilty. Butler did attempt a rambling defence about his own clothes being taken and never having seen either Mary Ann Morgan or Harber on the night in question. All Harber could come up with was that he had found the clothes the night before. Both were found guilty and sentenced to seven years transportation. They were both transported  to New South Wales on board the Surrey on 9 April. John went back to harness making in Hythe and died, still single, in 1852.

Probably none of them cared to recall the events of News Year’s Day, 1834

Sinners and (Latter Day) Saints – Part One

James Warby, a soldier with the 43rd Regiment of Foot, who had fought in the Peninsular Wars at the Battle of Nivelle in 1813, hung up his boots in Hythe, married Mary Woods and raised a family. All was well until, in April 1834,his eldest son, eighteen-year-old William, was found guilty of stealing a half-sovereign from Susanna and Andrew Lawler.  He had gone to the house to sell potatoes and noticed where the cash was kept.  He contrived to loiter after the sale. A small child was present whom he sent off on an errand, and once alone helped himself to the money, which he changed at a butcher’s in Sandgate. He was sentenced to six months in the town gaol.

He spent his sentence alongside Alexander Swain, who had received six months for burglary. By February the next year, they were both back in the same gaol, charged with stealing a pet rabbit from a local solicitor. Swain, probably fearing a stiff sentence, persuaded a seventeen-year-old girl who was visiting her brother in the gaol to give him her clothes. He walked out of the gaol dressed in a blue gaberdine frock and a hat. Of course, he was soon missed and only got as far as Rye before being apprehended the next day.

In court, both men were sentenced to seven years’ transportation. They were removed to the prison hulk Fortitude at Chatham. William, who was reported in gaol to have been bad-tempered and violent was apparently sobered by the hulk experience and was described as ‘orderly’. The men were transported on the ss Norfolk,  arriving in van Diemens Land (now Tasmania) on 28 Aug 1835. Once there, Alexander Swaine disappears from the records and probably died either during the voyage or shortly after arrival.

Van Diemen’s Land was known as a convict hell. Work was hard and punishments harsh. William received fifty lashes in September 1837 for disobeying orders.

 

A sketch of a Van Diemen’s Land chain gang

 

Henceforward, he kept out of trouble and got his Certificate of Freedom in 1842. The next year he sailed for Sydney, not just to get away from the place of his servitude, but to rejoin his family.

James Warby had brought his wife and family to New South Wales in 1839. It was not in fact, unusual for convict’s families to do this. Convicts rarely returned home and often their letters made Australia seem more attractive than England at a time of economic depression.  James must have decided that a reunion on the other side of the world was the best course of action, though he could not possibly have known how it would turn out. With him, apart from his wife Mary, were his other sons, John (19), James (17), Thomas (8) and daughters Mary Ann (15) and Celia (12). They arrived at Port Jackson as Bounty Immigrants then moved on to Morpeth and finally Maitland.

All the children married.

Mary Ann married first, just before her seventeenth birthday. She and her husband had fourteen children. Celia was next. She married John Chivington, a former convict,  on 13 Feb 1845. They had four children, but only two survived to adulthood.  Then James married Mary Ann Blanch in 1846 in Morpeth; John married in 1855 and had seven children and finally Thomas married in 1856 in Maitland and had eleven children.

On 25 February 1851, the husband of William’s younger sister, Celia, died.  William, now in New South Wales, moved in with her.  In 1853, their first child together was born and thereafter William and Celia lived together as husband and wife until their deaths, days apart, in September 1900.

We cannot know whether, from Celia’s perspective, this relationship was consensual or abusive. Whichever was the case, it brought terrible suffering to their children. They had seven, four of whom had  catastrophic disabilities: Noah, who lived to be forty as an ‘invalid’; Samuel, who died aged twenty-six, ‘a cripple from birth’;  Thomas, who lived only a few months and died of ‘inanition’, an inability to feed or drink; John, who died aged forty-four in an ‘asylum for imbeciles’.  It could be said that William’s real crimes were committed not in Hythe but in Australia.

To be continued….

Details of William’s life after leaving Van Diemen’s Land are taken from the Warby family’s site:

http://www.thetreeofus.net/3/182026.htm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tragedy and Farce – The Hyhams

James and Anne Hyham of Hythe had four sons and a daughter, born between 1798 and 1810. James, a shoemaker,  died young in 1812, but his widow managed to bring up her children without asking for parish relief. Anne received an annual gown each December from Mrs Ward’s charity, set up in 1751 to provide clothing for poor people of Hythe who received no help from other sources. It was perhaps her only new dress each year (1).

John, the eldest surviving son, was born in 1800 had a chequered career which stretched from the ineptly criminal to the farcical.  He became an agricultural labourer  and in 1825 married Elizabeth Brizeley. They had a son, James, in 1828 but Elizabeth died soon afterwards. John and James lodged at Redbrooke Cottages in Saltwood, until John decided one day in 1845 to pose as a pig dealer at Ashford Market. There he met a  Canterbury butcher, Mr Minter, offered to sell him two pigs, took Minter’s money and promised to deliver the animals the next week. Having no pigs, he went to Mr Rayner’s farm in Burmarsh, about five miles from Hythe, and stole two, got them into a cart and travelled all night to Canterbury to deliver them. Mr Rayner offered a £50 reward for information leading to the return of his animals and this yielded results. John was tried at Dymchurch and sent to prison for a year.

Ashford Livestock market in 1856

On his release, he married Martha Crapnell in 1847 and the couple went to live in Chapel Street, Hythe, where John worked a cordwainer (shoemaker), but he changed tack again and by 1861 was in charge of the canteen at Fort Montcrieff in West Hythe, a Coastguard station.  Then in the 1860s he was appointed Hythe Town Crier.

Perhaps life was a little dull, as in June 1868 he (aged 68)  and Isaac Hogben (53), a local fish dealer, decided to have a race to Canterbury.  Money – £5 each – was put on the race – and they set off up Stone Street in their horse-drawn carts. On arrival, each claimed victory.  John persuaded several people to swear (after a trip to the Flying Horse Inn) that he had won, but Hogben still denied it. To make matters worse, they were both arrested for ‘furious driving’ on the last leg of the race along Dover Road and fined £1 each

The Flying Horse Inn, at the end of Dover Road in Canterbury, the finishing point of the race.

The next month, he got involved in a fracas with a bill poster. John was working delivering advance publicity for a travelling circus and came into conflict with Richard Back, a local photographer who was equally keen to promote the annual Forresters’ fete at Brockhill. Each kept pasting his posters over those of the other. To quote the local newspaper:

On the morning of the fete, the rival bill-posters met under the market, each with a paste-pot and brush, defying each other. As soon as Back put up a poster, Hyham tore it down. The latter struck Mr Back and threw the contents of his paste-pot over him. Mr Back put up his arm to defend himself and somehow his paste brush ended up in Hyham’s mouth

Each of them was fined £1 16s.

It may be no coincidence that later that year, John retired as Town Crier.  He died ten years later.

His sister Elizabeth was the next oldest child. She was born in 1804 and married Edward Dixon Clarke in the town on 11 January 1830. Edward was a shoemaker but also worked for the Hythe town council as Town Sergeant and coal meter  (weighing coal which was delivered to the stade by collier boats), but was removed from office in 1838. Some suggested this was because he had voted for Conservative councillors rather than the Radicals (later Liberals) who now had the majority – votes were not then secret. His case was taken on by Edward Watts, formerly Town Clerk and himself at odds with the council. He was finally, in 1842, offered £25 compensation and in 1844 was reinstated with a salary of £5.16s a year.

He died two yeas later aged only forty-two, leaving Elizabeth pregnant with her ninth child.

After her husband’s death, Elizabeth remained in their Hillside Street home.  Like her mother before her, she managed to bring up her family without relying on the Overseers of the Poor, by taking work as a monthly nurse, caring for women and their new-borns in the weeks after childbirth.  She died herself in 1853

Elizabeth’s grave in St Leonards Churchyard

She is buried with her husband and an infant daughter

All her children’s ups and downs would have been a worry to their mother, Anne, but it was her youngest, Thomas, born in 1807, who must have broken her heart.

Thomas became a shoemaker, but on 6 January 1827, when he was just nineteen, he was convicted at a Hythe Sessions of the Peace of Highway Robbery and sentenced to death.

On 1 November the previous year, he had been drinking in the Bell public house along with a seaman of the Coastal Blockade, John Pendall and several other men. Pendall left before the others to return to Fort Twiss, where he was based, but was attacked by two men, pushed to the ground and relieved of his silver watch. He did not know his assailants’ names, but recognised one of them from earlier in the evening.  The description he gave the constable to whom he reported the attack was enough to lead to Thomas’s arrest.  He escaped at first and threw the watch behind some bushes, but was soon re-captured. The other man was never found and Thomas did not give him away.

Thomas was removed to Maidstone prison to await execution.

His mother got up a petition to appeal to the King for clemency. The grounds were that Thomas was young; that he had got into bad company and was drunk when the offence, which was his first,  took place. He was, the petition said, truly repentant. The petition was signed by seventy-one Hythe citizens and eleven of the jury  who had tried him and was accompanied by a supporting letter from Stuart Marjoribanks, the town’s M.P. (2). On 13 March, Sir Robert Peel, the Home Secretary, wrote to the Maidstone magistrates whom managed the prison that the King, George IV, was pleased to extend his mercy and pardon the crime, providing that Thomas be transported for life to Van Diemen’s Land or New South Wales.

His mother had saved his life, but must have known that she would never see him again.

He was sent first to the prison hulk the Dolphin, moored at Chatham. Hulks were decommissioned ships, no longer fit to go to sea and were convenient temporary holding quarters for convicts awaiting transportation to Australia and other penal colonies. During the day the convicts laboured in the Chatham dockyard. Thomas’s gaoler reported that he was from a respectable family and that his behaviour was ‘orderly’.

The hulks were overcrowded and disease-ridden and it may have come as a relief to set sail on 24 May 1827 on board the SS Champion , arriving in New South Wales 17 October 1827. Thomas was one of a hundred and twenty-eight passengers, fifty seven of whom had had life sentences. On arrival, he was put to work in a road gang. He waited nearly seventeen years for his Ticket of Leave, which gave him some limited freedom, by which time he was in Goulbourne in the southern tablelands of New South Wales. It had a population of about seven hundred. He petitioned for a conditional pardon 1849, which was refused, and again in 1855(3). The outcome is unknown and from then on Thomas disappears from the record.

His mother died as a Sister of St John’s Hospital in Hythe. The title ‘Sister’ referred back to the hospital’s medieval religious origins. It had always accepted Hythe men and women of good character who had fallen on hard times. Anne ended her days in relative comfort, at least.

1.  Kent Archives: H1205
2. National Archive: HO 17/25/182
3.  New South Wales Archives 4/4185; Reel 951

Two Ways To Get From Hythe to Australia

Two West Hythe brothers, John and Benjamin Cheeseman, both ended their days far from Kent, in Australia, but they made very different journeys there and had very different experiences.

John Cheeseman was born in West Hythe in 1814 and baptised in Burmarsh church on 27 November that year (West Hythe’s own church, St Mary’s, had long since fallen into ruin).

The remains of St Mary’s church, West Hythe…

… and All Saints’ church, Burmarsh, where John was baptised

He was the eldest child of his parents, John and Mary and received some education as he was, as an adult, recorded as being able to read and write. He married Mary Ann Hobday on 17 June 1832 in Folkestone and the couple had two sons, Charles in 1833 and John in 1835. When he arrived in Australia in 1839, he described himself as a shepherd.

West Hythe is on the fringes of the Romney Marsh, which was then home to thousands of sheep and to their shepherds who here were known as ‘Lookers’.  These men tended huge flocks of sheep over a vast area which meant that they had to spend long periods away from home, sleeping and sheltering in small, brick-built huts.  The Marsh is now dotted with these ruined huts, with around a dozen remaining from more than three hundred and fifty . Built of brick, about ten feet square, with Kent peg-tile roofs, bare rafters and a chimney, they were very functional.  All had a small window and a fireplace, but with very little in the way of domestic comforts.

A Looker’s hut near New Romney

Lookers were self-employed, hiring themselves out to graziers. One man might work for two or three . They were more in demand at some times of year than at others – at the lambing season and at shearing time for example.  Outside these times, they may have had to seek other seasonal work.

The wages of many agricultural workers were falling during this period. John now had a wife and two small children, too young to work, to support.  Workers could take several courses of action when destitution threatened: protest (as did the Tolpuddle Martyrs); succumb to the Poor Law and go into the workhouse; become terrorists (as did the Swing rioters) or turn to crime.

John was tried for sheep-stealing  at Hythe in 1837 but acquitted, but on 7 April the following year he was convicted of stealing two bushels of potatoes and sentenced to be transported for seven years.

He was sent to the hulks and sailed on board the ss John Barry from Sheerness on 12 November that year, arriving in Sidney on 22 March 1839. He was unwell on the way out and was treated by the surgeon for pneumonia. He left behind a British winter which would be especially bleak for his wife and children.

Destitute, they were sent to the Romney Union workhouse at New Romney in December (1). Ann was set to knitting stockings and, later, picking half-a-pound of oakum a day. At least the boys could be educated, as they attended the National School in the town, though workhouse children were not always welcome. For one thing, they were frequently scabby, or as, the chaplain put it, suffering from a ‘cutaneous infection, calculated to excite the fears of the Managers of the School and the parents of other children’.  The medical officer said they had, ecthyma, a type of impetigo caused by poor hygiene and crowded living conditions – but not infectious.

 

New Romney National School, opened in 1821

The family were still in the workhouse in 1843, when little Charles died there, aged eight of an intestinal complaint.

In Australia, John was assigned to a master named Robson in the Yass district, well-known for its production of fine merino fleece. His  skills as a shepherd would have been valued in this sheep country of New South Wales, where only one in five convicts assigned to masters had any agricultural  experience at all.  He was also used to the long hours of solitude of the Looker system on the Romney Marsh. The difference was that while the meadows in the Marsh are lush, here grass was hard to find and he could be away from the station for days.

He got his Ticket of Leave on 9 May 1843 (2). This allowed convicts to hire themselves out or be self-employed rather than work for the Government on the condition that they remained in a specified area, reported regularly to local authorities and if at all possible, attended divine worship every Sunday. They could also acquire property.

The marriage of John and Ann did not survive their separation.  John could read and write, so could send letters to his wife without having to pay a scribe ( convicts were often able to earn a little personal cash by working overtime). Communication between the couple was possible, though terribly slow – and we don’t know if Ann was literate.  John would have got Certificate of Freedom after seven years servitude in 1845. He could have returned home (if he could get together the fare), or arranged for Ann to join him – Poor Law Guardians would sometimes pay for the passage and Romney Union looked favourably on such applications, which relieved them of the necessity of providing for the family.

Neither of these things happened and by 1851 Ann was living with William Webb, a coal miner, in Yorkshire. They told the census enumerator they were married, but no record of a marriage exists, and would in any case have been bigamous.  It must have been hard for Ann after John’s conviction: years in the workhouse, a widow yet not a widow and the mother of a dead child. Her remaining son, John, worked alongside his step-father in the mines.

Did John senior know of this arrangement, or had communications between the couple broken down?  Whichever was the case, on 10 October 1853 he married a young widow, Christina Stewart, a Scotswoman, at Wagga Wagga.  Such second marriages were not unusual.  John would have known that the chances of anyone finding out that Ann was still alive  were very slim indeed.

Wagga Wagga in its early days

Christina and her first husband had come to Australia as sponsored free immigrants. She had some money, and used it to buy land in Wagga Wagga which she and John farmed. In 1860, they had a daughter, Amy (perhaps named for John’s little sister Amy), and lived at Wagga Wagga as farmers until their deaths,  Christina’s in 1886, John’s in 1888.  It was almost certainly a materially better life than John could have expected in Hythe.

His surviving son with Ann went on to become an ironstone miner and to father three children. His Australian daughter Amy became a mother of nine.

As well as a little sister, John had a younger brother, Benjamin, who eventually travelled to Australia, too. Benjamin was born, like John, in West Hythe, in about 1828.  He worked as a labourer as an adult and  moved to Dover where in 1848 he married Jane Bass. The couple returned to Hythe where they and their three children lived in Stade Street.  There was another child, too, Thomas Bass, Jane’s illegitimate son.  In February 1853,  Benjamin secured sponsorship from James Egan, who owned a sheep station in Victoria, and the family sailed on board the ss Calliope from Southampton on 3 February 1853. The ship’s records show that Benjamin and Jane had been contracted to work for Egan at the Major’s Line station near Heathcote in Victoria for a period of six months, for which they were to be paid fifty pounds plus rations.

They completed their contract and then followed hundreds of others to the Maryborough goldfields. The goldfields of Victoria may very well have been the lure in the first place.  Gold had been discovered in Ballarat, only 58 km from Maryborough, in 1851 and the area became a magnet for anyone with dreams of a quick fortune.  All that was needed was a licence to prospect, at a cost of thirty shillings a month. When the Maryborough venture proved unproductive, Benjamin and his family moved on to Ararat, where gold had been discovered in 1857.

Edward Roper, Gold diggings, Ararat, ca. 1854–58, oil on canvas, State Library of New South Wales – here, as at Maryborough, prospectors lived in tented accommodation. 

Then Benjamin disappeared or died, though there are no records of his death. His wife, or widow, went on to have another relationship and lived until 1888.

Their eldest son, Alfred, worked as a woodcutter and splitter, an occupation which guaranteed him employment. Australian settlers were busy at the time putting up hundreds of miles of post and rail fences round their sheep stations to control their grazing stock.  For three years, he worked in New South Wales, based at Wagga Wagga, where his uncle John lived with his wife Christina. His wife and children went with him and must have met the elder Cheesemans:  Alfred’s next two children, born in Wagga Wagga, were called – John and Christina.   They returned to Victoria in 1877, where they raised their family of twelve children.

His half-brother Thomas, who now used the name Cheeseman, also married and had seven children and Frances, his sister (who was known as Annie) also married and also produced seven children.

John and Benjamin Cheeseman had between them at least thirty-three grandchildren who reached adulthood.  There must be huge numbers of descendants of these Hythe brothers in Australia and England and who knows where else.

1. Kent Archives G/Rm/AM2

2.     New South Wales Archives 4/4176; Reel 948

Details of John’s second marriage and Benjamin’s life in Australia have been taken from http://www.graemecheeseman.com

The Hole Family Part 2

The first part of this blog was published in 2016, before I discovered the sad story of Elizabeth Back, nee Hole. I am indebted to David Haynes of Queensland for this extra information.  

Elizabeth Hole, the eldest child of James and Elizabeth Hole of Hythe was born on 24 September 1814. She became a servant and married Daniel Back (or sometimes Beck) in Marylebone, London in 1837. He was also a domestic servant. Less than two years later, they emigrated to Australia, leaving from Plymouth on 13th May 1839 aboard the Lady Raffles with 234 other souls and their baby son, another Daniel. They arrived in September. They were enticed into applying for emigration to the new colony of New South Wales by advertisements posted in London and other cities. This whole adventure must have seemed quite attractive at the time: their passage was paid for and employment was virtually assured once they arrived in Sydney. This was the so-called Bounty system, separate from the Government sponsored scheme.

                                                                         An example of Bounty emigration advertising

 

This opportunity seemed almost too good to be true and it was. Once there, Elizabeth and Daniel and all their co-emigrants were abandoned, left to fend for themselves. The jobs and housing did not materialise and there was no room in the Government-run accommodation.  Elizabeth gave birth again in 1840, to a daughter, Susan but there is no further trace of either of her children. It seems probable that they died.

Elizabeth left Australia, and Daniel, in about 1842. We don’t know whether it was the country or the man she wanted to escape, but she must have been desperate enough to find her own fare. Daniel remained in the new colony and soon developed a new partnership with another woman with whom he had six children before marrying her in 1858. He must have assumed that Elizabeth was dead.

She was not. She had entered the service of Mrs Elizabeth Frederica Crofts, the wife of Peter Guerin Crofts, the retired rector of St. John-sub-Castro in Lewes. She was his second wife and twenty years his junior and Elizabeth was her ladies maid. Their house, in Lewes,  was vast (it is now the HQ of Sussex Police) and required a live-in staff of eight, including a butler, coachman and footman.

Malling House

The fact that it was in Lewes is significant: Daniel Back had been born near there, his family still lived nearby, so it seems that when she returned from Australia, Elizabeth went to her in-laws rather than her own family in Hythe. It is entirely possible that she was expecting Daniel to join her there.

Peter Crofts died in 1859, but Elizabeth stayed with her mistress until the latter’s death in 1878.  She then returned to Hythe where she lived in Stade Street and described herself as an annuitant and widow.  It is likely that Mrs Crofts remembered her faithful servant in her will and provided a pension so that she would not end her life in poverty. Her old age, though, according to her gravestone, was not a happy time.

She is buried with her sister Mary Hole, born in 1818, who alone of the siblings did not marry. She went to Ashford to live with her brother Thomas, and later with one of his daughters. Eventually she, too, returned to Hythe and lived in St Bartholomew’s almshouse in the town.

The former St Bartholomew’s Almshouse in Hythe, now a private dwelling

 

In/loving memory/of/Elizabeth Back/who died 3rd March 1890/aged 75 years
Afflictions sore long time she bore/physicians were in vain/til death did cease and God did please/to ease her of her pain
Also of Mary Hole/sister of the above/who died11th December 1900/in her 82nd year
Well done good and faithful servant/enter thou into the joy of thy Lord