Dorset’s men of conviction
John Wright looks at what became of those convicts from Dorset sent to the far side of the world
Published in November ’17
Legge was an unfortunate name for a Dorset shoemaker because a leg was one of the only bits left of George Legge after falling off a boat in Botany Bay, New South Wales, and being eaten by a shark. It was June 1807 when ‘stormy weather overturned a sailboat in which he was travelling with several aborigines,’ wrote Michael Flynn in The Second Fleet: Britain’s Grim Convict Armada of 1790. ‘He had been weighed down by two greatcoats he was wearing, and the following week fishermen found a human hand in the belly of a shark they had caught.’
Port Arthur Pentitentiary, south-eastern Tasmania
Dorset provided its share of some 137,000 men and 25,000 women transported to Australia in the 80 years after 1787. Women spent the common seven-year term as ‘assigned servants’, men were often given land to farm. It was 8 June 1800 when burglar Ambrose Rideout (often spelt Ridout) broke into the house in Manston rented by Richard Foot and his wife, Cybil, while they were out milking. ‘Ridout got in at the back door in the Garden and broke open their Box and stole 69 Guineas [£5,200 in today’s terms] in gold and a few shillings in Silver also some silver Pocket pieces,’ according to the Tasmanian Government’s historical website, LINC Tasmania. If caught it was more than enough (£1 was often considered the minimum) to get him hanged. All thieves could hope for was a reprieve, while other offenders were banished for less, one Iwerne Minster man, Robert James, being transported to New South Wales in 1790 because he ‘maliciously, injuriously and feloniously did lop, top, cut and spoil’ a large branch from an ash tree belonging to Thomas Bower, captain of the Dorsetshire Yeoman Cavalry.
Tolpuddle Martyrs statue outside the Tolpuddle Martyrs Museum in Tolpuddle, Dorset. It shows George Loveless waiting to be transported to Australia
Rideout was found guilty and sentenced to death, then reprieved and transported for life. He sailed with 299 other convicts, including John Lawrence from Halstock and Philip Strickland from Corfe Mullen, on the naval ship HMS Calcutta on 24 April 1803. Led by Lieutenant Governor David Collins, in October they entered Port Philip Bay, becoming the first Europeans to land in Victoria, not far from where Melbourne would later be established. New South Wales Governor Philip King sent the 421 marines, convicts and settlers on to Hobart in southern Tasmania to help establish the newly founded colony there.
By 1810 Rideout had a grant of 30 acres and had received a conditional pardon. In 1819 he had 3½ acres of wheat, ½ acre of beans, ½ acre of potatoes and the rest in pasture, and the following year he was robbed of tobacco, cutlery and supplies by four convict escapees turned bushrangers, three of whom were later caught and hanged. Rideout was fully pardoned in 1821 and died in 1836 at the age of 81.
The most famous Dorset convicts were the Tolpuddle Martyrs, farm labourers from the village of Tolpuddle – Thomas Standfield, his son John, James Brine, James Hammett, James Loveless and his brother George, who had been tricked by local farmers over wages. The charge against them was a contrived one of breaking the Illegal Oaths Act, when all they were doing was discussing how they could convince local squires and landowners to pay landless labourers with families nine or ten shillings a week instead of six or seven shillings. In October 1833 they formed a ‘Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers at Tolpuddle’ and thought their pay claim was accepted, but local bigwigs resented the confident upstarts and tried to dishonour them publicly.
Contemporary drawing of convicts in a chain gang in Australia
The following March they were tried at Dorchester and sentenced to seven years transportation, the men sent to New South Wales except George Loveless, whom they sent to Tasmania. Few people in Australia regarded these men as offenders, since all they had done was peacefully stand up for decent pay. Tasmania’s Governor Arthur wrote to the colonial authorities in London on 5 September 1834 that evidently George Loveless, and his companions had ‘ignorantly become the victims of more artful men’. Governor Arthur, instead of sending Loveless to the chain gang – a punishment which he described as ‘as severe as can well be inflicted on any man’ – reserved him for work on a Government farm after only one week in irons.
This letter helped bring about an unconditional pardon and free passage home, which was granted in March 1836, although the prisoners were kept waiting before being freed. The men also had no idea that they had many supporters in England who had marched through London with 800,000 signatures on a petition calling for their release. Alas, while Hammett would settle back in Tolpuddle, Dorset would lose the other five men, who eventually migrated to Ontario, Canada,
and farmed.
Port Arthur Penitentiary today, Tasman Peninsula, south-eastern Tasmania, Australia
Some Dorset convicts had less support. According to David Hawkings in Bound for Australia, ‘at the Dorset Epiphany Sessions on 6 January 1835 at Dorchester, Grace Mowlan had stolen from her home in Worbarrow, Purbeck, by former lodger, Hannah Swayne, 43, of Tyneham, Purbeck, one white petticoat, one black cloth shawl, one white calico apron marked “G.M.” and divers other articles.’ Transported on the Henry Wellesley, Swayne was one of six of the 118 female convicts who died during the four-month voyage, the ship’s surgeon, Superintendent Robert Wylie, writing in his journal, ‘Hannah Swayne, aged 47 years, put into ship’s hospital suffering with a fever. From her appearance accustomed to drinking spirits. She died on 2 December 1835’, two months before the ship arrived in Port
Jackson (Sydney).
Twenty-year-old labourer George Apsey was convicted at the Dorset Assizes for stealing clothes, arriving in Tasmania on the Sir Charles Forbes in July 1830, and, inexplicably, dying three years later. His Tasmanian convict record, added to by a ‘Community Contribution’ from Carol Axton-Thompson in 2014, hints at his downfall while assigned to different employers, ‘March 1831: drunk, 21 days Tread Wheel. June 1831: drunk, 7 days Tread Wheel. August 1831: drunk and fight innkeeper at Walfords Public House, 25 lashes. June 1832: insolent. July 1832: insolent and make false accusation against Master – imprisonment with 6 months hard labour on a road party gang. 23 August 1832: died at hospital, Hobart Town. Buried.’
Serious offenders were often sent to the infamous Port Arthur Penitentiary on Tasmania’s south-eastern peninsula, separated from its mainland by a narrow neck of land guarded by a line of vicious dogs. Some of the crimes convicts committed at Port Arthur gaol are variously odd or ridiculous. Caught in the Act (published by Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority) cites John Glanville committing 55 offences over ten years including ‘having turnips improperly’. One convict was reprimanded for ‘washing his shirt during Divine Service’, another for ‘baking light bread’! The list goes on: ‘feloniously, wilfully and diabolically interfering with a dog…having lollipops in his possession…setting fire to his bedding…drawing improper figures on his slate…threatening to split the overseer’s skull with his spade…gross filthiness within the barrack square…wilfully breaking his wooden leg…apprehending Godfrey Moore and biting his nose off…groaning at the Lieutenant Governor when he entered Government House. One woman got two months in the Female House of Correction for ‘concealing a man under her bed’. Best of all was George ‘Billy’ Hunt. Transported for fourteen years for stealing a handkerchief, his crime was ‘absconding’, Billy being ‘dressed as a kangaroo at the time and attempting to hop to freedom, only to be shot at by rationed soldiers accustomed to hearty kangaroo stews.’
As for Dorset’s real escape artist, smuggler Samuel Norster was from the Isle of Portland and with his wife, Jane, had four children. Caught burgling with his brother, Abraham, the pair was transported. Abraham died on the way, while Samuel played the model citizen, called ‘good, very useful’, perhaps a deliberate ploy to gain his freedom. ‘Good behaviour was the key to promising jobs,’ wrote Alison Alexander in Tasmania’s Convicts: How Felons Built a Free Society. ‘He [Samuel] became coxswain of the government boat at George Town on the north coast. One night in 1839 he stowed away on a visiting schooner among the cattle in the hold…. After nine days the ship reached South Australia. Samuel gained a berth as a seaman on a ship to California, and took another ship for England. Finally he reached Dorset and his family.’
It wasn’t to last. Someone who knew him reported him and again he was transported, this time for life. Once again he was well-behaved but this time he was sent in chains to Port Arthur Penitentiary, a place that struck fear into the hardest offenders. Samuel’s record ends with a single word scrawled across the page: ‘Run’. He had absconded yet again. Did he reach Portland? No records survive to answer that question.
