The cook, the thieves, the prostitute and the postillion – convicts transported to Australia

My convict ancestors were an unusual lot – but three of them were also really common. That’s the conclusion I came to after looking at a clever take on transportation statistics on one Australian website.

Convicts going to work near Sydney (via Wikipedia)

Three out of four of mine were thieves, the crime committed by the largest number (41.4%) of transported convicts in the records at ConvictRecords.com.au, the online resource based on the British Convict transportation register for ships bound for Australia between 1787-1867. It covers 123,888 convicts from an estimated total of 160,000.

The database hasn’t got the records for Atlas II, the ship on which Nicholas Delaney arrived in 1802, and there seems to be a gap where a lot of Irish rebels – or political prisoners – from 1798 should be.

Half-hanging of suspected United Irishman (via Wikipedia)

There were four murderers, which was what Nicholas was convicted of, and one transported for high treason. I reckon that last one got off lightly. Until 1814, the punishment for a man was to be hung, drawn and quartered. This meant being hung, but without the long drop which could cause death. After a period of strangulation the victim was cut down, stripped naked, and, while still conscious, castrated, his belly cut open and his internal organs pulled out and burnt in front of him. At last he would be beheaded and his body cut into quarters which, with his head, would be publicly displayed as a warning to others. The punishment was designed to combine long torture (and half-hanging was notoriously also used against many suspected or genuine United Irishmen in the 1790s) with ritual humiliation.

After theft, the most common offences were larceny (12.7%), burglary (6.3%), housebreaking (5.2%) and robbery (3.9%) – there seems to be a pattern there. Some convicts were a little more imaginative in their crimes, though, with one transported for riotous conduct and felony, five machine breakers, one bigamist, seven sheep stealers and four horse thieves. There is also one convicted of being a shoemaker, but I suspect that just might be a mistake.

Occupations

As for their jobs, my great-great-great grandfather John Simpson, who arrived in New South Wales on the Ocean II in 1818, was one of only four tailors on the database. James Thomas Richards of Deptford, the 2x great grandfather who I’ve just begun looking at, was the only waterman.

The top three occupations of transported criminals were those of labourer (12.3%), farmer (5.7%) and at 5.1%… convict. Were these repeat offenders? James Thomas Richards was convicted of another crime while serving his time in New South Wales, but the same convict system did not operate in Britain. Were they prisoners who re-offended while in custody? Do you know the answer?

Perhaps not surprisingly, housemaids come top of the specifically female occupations with 10 (2.9%) transported. They would have had plenty of temptation and opportunities to pocket the family silver and other portables. The two nursery maids, two general maids and one plain cook/house servant would have had fewer chances but probably no less covetousness.

Black-Eyed Sue and Sweet Poll of Plymouth say goodbye to their convicted lovers (via Wikipedia)

Three needlewomen, three dairymaids and three housewives found themselves bound for Australia. Maids, laundresses and housekeeper/cooks went out two by two. One nurse/midwife is on the list, and there is one book folder, a trade which was often carried out by women. Perhaps surprisingly, there is only one prostitute. It’s interesting to note that nobody was specifically transported for plying the oldest profession.

Back to the men, and there was a mill worker, possibly one of the machine breakers – or were the three weavers responsible, with their livelihoods threatened by the new mills? We don’t know whether these were hand weavers (usually male) or steam weavers (mostly female), but if they were male Luddites, they were lucky to be transported – 17 others were executed after a trial in York in 1813.

From the professional classes, one accountant got caught fiddling the figures and was sent overseas, as was one doctor.

Some of the more unusual occupations included a miniature painter, a gilt toy maker, a leather trunk maker, a coach painter, a glover’s assistant, a painter’s boy and a wool sorter. There was a shosebinder (is this something to do with shoe-making? It could be an alternative spelling). The only whitesmith listed worked with ‘white’ metals like tin, not ‘black’ iron.

Coach driven by a postillion (via Wikipedia)

And I’ve saved the best till last. I’ve always wanted to write this – a postillion. Not struck by lightning, but dealt a heavy blow by being transported to the other side of the world. Yet at the same time fortunate, like all my convict ancestors were, to keep their lives, to escape imprisonment and to be given the chance to make a new life in Australia.

I’ve found two of my ancestors on this list – have you spotted any of yours? Are you a descendant of the shosebinder, the prostitute or the postillion?

Wealth for Toil – Australia Day challenge for 2012

I’ve been scratching my head over this blog post. Shelley from Twigs of Yore has challenged us to write about the work one of our ancestors did and I’ve decided to stick with Nicholas Delaney because I’ve got so much documentary evidence about his life, from his trial in 1799 and arrival in Sydney Cove in 1802 onwards.

It’s finding out about what working lives were like 200 years ago that’s been the real challenge for me this January, and it’s been fascinating.

Nicholas was a landless, illiterate peasant when he got caught up in the Irish Rebellion of 1798 – a hired hand. He would have been tough and muscular then, but three years’ imprisonment and the long voyage from Cork would have wasted him.

Sydney, 1802 (KirrilyRobert via Flickr)

Still, he was strong enough for Major George Johnston of the New South Wales Corps to select him to work on his own land instead of being put to Government service like so many town-bred thieves were. He knew farming, and this is how he passed the beginning of his sentence on Australia. Johnston prided himself on reforming his convicts – and feeding them lots of vegetables. Nicholas’s luck was in.

On January 26, 1808 (the 20th anniversary of the founding of the new colony), George Johnston was involved in the Rum Rebellion, Australia’s only successful military coup. Soon after that Nicholas left his service and, in October, he married Elizabeth Bayly, a free settler and something of a mystery.  Family oral history has him working as a gardener (or butler! Where did that come from, I wonder) at Government House.

5 shovels and 3 tomahaws

Our first documentary evidence of his day-to-day work is on 9th November 1812, when the Acting Commissary issued him, ‘the Government Park Keeper’, with ’5 shovels and 2 large tomahaws [sic] and 3 shovels’.

This shows that Nicholas, the rebel and convicted double murderer,  was now trusted to be the overseer of a gang of labourers, a job he was to do for a while, and also to look after their tools – a big responsibility in New South Wales, where there were no mines and all metal equipment had to be brought in by ship.

Macquarie (via Wikipedia)

His luck was in again, because the new Governor, Lachlan Macquarie, was determined to smarten Sydney up and build good roads into the interior of the colony. Nicholas Delaney was the perfect man to lead one of Macquarie’s road gangs.

A report of 1812 describes how the roadbuilders were organised:

‘They work from six in the morning to three in the afternoon, and the remainder of the day is allowed to them, to be spent either in amusement or profitable labour for themselves. They are clothed, fed, and for the most part lodged by the Government.’*

However the Bigge Report of 1822 paints a picture of unruly convicts, unsupervised, drunken and thieving. John Thomas Bigge was doing his best to discredit Macquarie.

In 1816, Nicholas was involved in two prestigious projects for the Governor in Sydney. His gang was hard at work building Mrs Macquarie’s Road, a pleasant drive round the Domain designed by Lachlan’s wife Elizabeth, and taking in her favourite viewpoint, Mrs Macquarie’s Chair.

Part of the original road Nicholas and his men built can still be seen, at Macquarie Culvert.

Lachlan Macquarie's diary for 13 June 1816 (Original in State Library of NSW)

By a stroke of luck (or canny planning) they finished the entire job on her birthday, the 16th of June. Her delighted husband wrote in his diary that as a reward for completing ‘on this particular and auspicious Day‘, he would give ‘Delaney and his gang of Ten Men, five gallons of Spirits among them’. The Macquaries would not have been the only ones having a party that night.

Hardly had their hangovers gone before they were at work on a new project, ‘clearing and levelling that Piece of Ground in the Town of Sydney, adjoining the Government Domain called “Macquarie Place,” preparatory to its being enclosed by a Dwarf Stone Wall and Paling in the form of a Triangle!’ as the Governor wrote in his diary on 1st July.

Macquarie Place. Photo: Patricia Owen

The New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage recognises it as ‘one of the most historically significant urban spaces in Sydney and Australia’, but most people know it for convict architect Francis Greenway‘s obelisk.

Later that year Nicholas was promoted to Superintendent of Road Makers at the generous salary of £91.5s a year (about £63,500 today). Wealth for toil, indeed!

Nicholas’s other construction work that we know about took place outside Sydney. He may have been one of William Cox’s supervisors during the building of the Great Western Highway across the Blue Mountains. I’m still looking into this – it would be great to know by the bicentenary of Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Wentworth‘s crossing of the Blue Mountains in 2013.

We do know that after his promotion Nicholas (now ‘Mr Delaney’) began work on the Parramatta to Penrith road, conveniently close to his grant of 50 acres at Emu. The work was urgent. On 23 September 1818, the Colonial Secretary wrote to the Assistant Commissary General at Parramatta that Nicholas’s 36 men had to work ‘during the whole of each Day’ instead of being free from three o’clock, and would therefore be given one and a half times the standard rations.

Hard-working

Rations were not always available for the hard-working men, though. On 17 January 1820, Mr Delaney and the other overseers in the Parramatta area petitioned the government to complain about arrangements for issuing rations.

It was their job to collect ‘provisions… at Parramatta and occasionally tools, slops [convicts' clothes] and other stores at Sydney’. The problem was that the Parramatta storekeeper only turned up at 1030 or 1100 in the morning to issue meat – by which time, in the summer heat, it was unfit to eat. They suggested that seven would be a better time. The Colonial Secretary answered quickly, agreeing because ‘much time is lost, to the manifest prejudice of the Public Service, as well as to the great personal inconvenience to the overseers themselves’. Not to mention the inconvenience to the hungry labourers.

By now he was being referred to as Principal Overseer, Great Western Road. But the good times were nearly over for Mr Delaney the roadbuilder.

The end of the road

Lachlan Macquarie had been sent back to Britain in December 1821, and on 12 January, 1822, while his patron was sailing away from Australia, Nicholas was ‘displaced from his situation on the Western Road’. There is no clue as to why he was removed, but the new Governor, Sir Thomas Brisbane, cut the number of convicts working on the roads. Fewer gangs need fewer overseers.

There is another possibility. At some stage Nicholas broke his thigh. If this had happened while he was working on the Western Highway he would no longer be able to supervise his gangs.

But perhaps the simplest reason is that he had applied to the Evan Magistrates for a spirits licence in December 1821, and they had found him and Elizabeth ‘proper persons’ to run a pub in ‘his Dwelling House on the Western Road’. Whether he had realised that his career on the roads was over when Macquarie left, or whether it was a coincidence, I don’t know. But from now on, Mr Delaney was an innkeeper and a farmer.

* Wannan, Bill (ed), The Australian, Melbourne, 1954, p 135

Family myths, cover-ups – what did Nicholas Delaney really do?

I’m researching my blog post for Twigs of Yore‘s Australia Day challenge. This year it’s about work. Shelley says:

Choose someone who lived in Australia (preferably one of your ancestors) and tell us how they toiled. Your post should include:

1. What was their occupation?
2. What information do you have about the individual’s work, or about the occupation in general?
3. The story of the person, focussing on their occupation; or
   The story of the occupation, using the person as an example

I’m looking forward to taking part. Last year’s Twigs of Yore challenge – to write about the earliest document you have found relating to an ancestor -  was what started me blogging regularly (I wrote about Nicholas Delaney’s 1799 trial transcript).

Moyne, the family farm

But who to choose? And which occupation?

Most of my Aussie ancestors were farmers. Then there’s another great-great-great grandfather, John Simpson, who was a tailor. Or I could stick with Nicholas. He ended up farming, but before that he was a roadbuilder, both as a convict and a free man, and an innkeeper. In Ireland, before the Rebellion of 1798, he was a landless labourer.

Secrets

And there are the false leads, the family myths and cover-ups. Before we started to look closely at Nicholas’s life, we’d heard a few of these, the results of misinformation and the shame that used to cling to having convict ancestry. They can’t be blamed – it was all part of the idea of the ‘Convict Stain’. How times have changed.

Government House, Sydney, 1802 (Wikipedia)

We’d been told that he’d been the Lord Mayor of Belfast (highly unlikely!). In Australia, family stories had him as a gardener and a butler at Government House in Sydney, where he had met his wife, Elizabeth Bayly, who was a maid there. Or he was a carpenter working on an extension to the (‘Old’) Government House in Parramatta.

All very respectable. But in researching family history there are often false leads. And there is no written evidence to support these stories. So, tempting as they are, they go into the bin.

So – a tailor, a roadbuilder, an innkeeper or a farmer? What’s it to be? Do come back on the 26th January and find out.

What else was happening in Australia?

Reading other genealogy and family history blogs and posts is inspiring. One idea I’ve been impressed by is having a timeline of the historical background to someone’s life.

So here is what was happening in Australia during the time Nicholas Delaney was there, from his arrival in 1802 to 1810. I’ll cover the next two decades in later posts.

1802

Approximately 6,000 people lived in the colony of New South Wales. Men outnumbered women by about 20 to 1. Philip Gidley King was Governor.

Aboriginal man (via Wikipedia)

June After a twelve-year guerilla campaign, Eora leader Pemulwuy was shot and killed. His son Tedbury would continue the resistance for eight more years.

October 30 Nicholas Delaney, aboard the convict ship Atlas II, arrives in Sydney Cove along with 189 other Irish political prisoners. Nicholas was assigned to Major George Johnston of the New South Wales Corps.

1803

By now a total of 2086 Irish convicts were in Australia.

A second major settlement was established, in Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania.

May 15 James Dixon, Irish priest convicted of ‘complicity’ in the 1798 Rebellion, conducted the first Catholic Mass in New South Wales.

1804

The population of the colony neared 7,000. One third were dependent on Government rations.

Battle of Castle Hill (Vinegar Hill) via Wikipedia

March 4 The first armed uprising in the colony, led by veterans of the Irish Rebellion, took place at Castle Hill. Also known as the second Battle of Vinegar Hill, it was put down by troops led by Nicholas’s master, George Johnston. Reprisals were swift and brutal.

One consequence was the Catholic Mass being banned. 1798 had a long arm.

In England to be court-martialled, John Macarthur of the NSW Corps convinced the British government that farming sheep for wool on a large scale would be beneficial.

1805

The explorer Matthew Flinders, the first to circumnavigate the continent, proposed that it should be named Australia. The new name proved popular.

1806

August William Bligh arrived as the new Governor, intent on cutting Government expenditure and curbing corrupt practices including the trade in spirits carried out by the ‘Rum’ Corps. His authoritarian attitude made him unpopular – not for the first time in his life.

1807

Bligh decided that small crop and livestock farmers were the future of the colony, not large landowners or sheep breeders.

May Elizabeth Bayly arrived on the Brothers as a free settler.

1808

Arrest of Governor Bligh (propoganda cartoon)

26 January The ‘Rum Rebellion’. The NSW Corps under George Johnston arrested Bligh and installed a new government.

For two years the colony was to be under military rule, headed by Lieutenant-Governors William Paterson and, later, Joseph Foveaux.

Nicholas Delaney’s term of service with Johnston ended; he became a Government overseer in Sydney.

October 17 Nicholas and Elizabeth were married by Major Abbott.

1809

In England, it was decided that naval officers were not the best men to govern New South Wales. The Rum Corps was to be replaced by the 73rd Regiment of Foot and Major-General Lachlan Macquarie was to be the next Governor.

December Nicholas was told he had a free pardon and was granted a lease of land.

The next decade would bring a new regime for Australia and a new life for Nicholas.

I’ve used several sources for this timeline, including those cited in full in A Rebel Hand: Nicholas Delaney of 1798: From Ireland to Australia. The most detailed online is Australian History Timeline, and the Australian Dictionary of Biography and Wikipedia are useful.

If you spot anything I’ve left out, do let me know and I’ll add it.

PS: I’ve been trying to remember if there was one specific blog which inspired this timeline. It may have been Olive Tree Genealogy Blog, Family History Fun – or another. It could well have been a discussion on the Australian Genealogy Facebook page.

Has your blog or website got a timeline?

2011 – what a year it’s been!

What a year – and what a lot I’ve learned in this first full year of blogging.

When I started this blog in November 2010 I knew I wanted to talk about topics related to the life of my great-great-great grandfather, Nicholas Delaney. But I didn’t want to just repeat what is already in the book my mother and I wrote about him, A Rebel Hand: Nicholas Delaney of 1798: From Ireland to Australia.

1798 memorial, Ballyellis

That wouldn’t inspire me, and if I’m not excited about what I’m writing about it won’t be interesting to anyone else – especially those who have read the book and won’t want repetition.

So I decided to expand on topics in the book, and write around the history and the family events I knew about as well as exploring new angles. More of this soon.

Television

I was hugely lucky this year because BBC TV showed two programmes which couldn’t be closer to Nicholas’s story and the lives of the people he knew.

Lachlan Macquarie (image via Wikipedia)

On Australia Day (January 26) they screened The Father of Australia, a drama-documentary about Governor Lachlan Macquarie, who Nicholas worked for as a road gang overseer and who mentions Nicholas in his diaries.

Then in the spring, Fergal Keane’s five-part series, Story of Ireland, was broadcast and on May 30 it covered the Irish rising of 1798, where Nicholas’s story begins for us.

But what really kick-started my blogging was Twigs of Yore‘s Australia Day challenge – and this was one of the real revelations of 2011 for me; the online genealogy community.

Inspiration

I knew about a few people on Facebook, like Irish Wattle, but it was only when I started looking at other genealogy blogs (and there’s no better place to start than Geneabloggers) and adding to my Facebook contacts that I realised how many others there were with vast experience to inspire me.

Then Google+ started up and I joined Twitter and… well, I could spend hours reading about history and genealogy – if I had a double to do everything else.

Sarah Simpson's grave (Michael Wood)

Some of my most popular posts have been the ones about Nicholas’s trial, about 1798 and his work building the infrastructure of early Sydney. But one was completely unpredictable – the discovery that my 3xgreat grandmother on another branch of the family tree is said to be a famous ghost. What can I learn from this?

And now…

So, that’s enough looking back, what about 2012? Unlike many more experienced genealogy bloggers I’m not going to make any resolutions, since so much of what happened last year was a pleasant surprise.

Instead I’ll promise myself to keep my mind as open as my eyes and continue to ask -

More Irish history? More about the early days of colonial Australia? Or something completely different? What would you like to see here in 2012? I’d love to hear from you.

And a happy New Year to you and yours!

How’s your family tree?

Flourishing? Many-branched?

Or lop-sided (mine is a bit, at the moment)? A seedling? Not yet started?

If yours needs a bit of nourishment and care, now is a good time to start looking after it -

It’s Start Your Family Tree Week in the UK and Republic of Ireland.

Family tree (image via Wikipedia)

And there are sites to give us tips, encouragement and even competition prizes. I’m going to be looking at Findmypast Ireland and UK and at Chris Paton’s British GENES as well as Ancestry UK’s Family Tree.

Do you know any others?

My first Christmas – a link with the past

I treasure this photograph.

It’s of my grandfather, Laurence Thomas Delaney, holding me on his knee on my first Christmas Day.

Laurence Thomas Delaney and me

He’s my link to all the generations of Delaneys (and Marshalls, Simpsons, Wilsons and Henleys) in Australia over two centuries.

Pop, as we called him, was born on the family farm, Moyne, in Little Hartley, New South Wales, but left to go adventuring, breaking the long tradition of working on the land. As a journalist, he went to Hong Kong and South America and ended up in London where he worked in the entertainment industry.

He died when I was three years old and I wish I’d known him better.

So this Christmas I’ll be thinking of my family; the ones who are no longer alive as well as the ones who make this time of year so precious.

I wish you and yours a very merry Christmas.