James, son of William in the last post was born in 1813, and as we have seen his family were
not that well off. The 1830s and 40s
were a bad time for all Labourers, food was short, prices were high. James was a young man, and in 1834 he did a
very foolish thing.
James and his friend Abraham Chapple knew
William Skingle,
Skingle was a Farmer in Farnham, James and Abe may have worked for him.
I can think of few things more foolish than to steal from someone you know in
broad daylight, so have assumed that James and Abe bore some kind of
grudge. Possibly James and Abe felt that
they were owed unpaid wages, who knows?
In any event, on 23rd October 1834, Skingle went to Bishop's Stortford to
collect some money. I have wondered if
this was a regular thing, perhaps he went to collect the week's wages for his
men.
He was walking hone to Farnham, when James and Abe met him,
took his money and fled.
The road from Stortford to Farnham runs from North Street, it
passes through Northgate End and then curls north, where it becomes a country
lane. When I visited, in the summer of
1995, the road was overgrown, bordered by fields, and very quiet. I imagine that in 1834 it was a great deal
quieter.
James and Abe were never going to get away with it, of
course. They must have been caught quite
quickly, and their case (reported in the "Chelmsford Chronicle") was
heard at the Essex Assizes (Lent: 1835). Jennifer Clark (nee Ginn) has also sent me the snippet from the radical newspaper "The True Sun" (Charles Dickens was a contributor) which is reproduced below.
Abe (at 25) was some four years older than James, but the
pair were both dealt with in the same way.
Highway Robbery was a hanging offence, though the sentence was seldom
carried out for that crime by 1835. The
pair of them were thus sentenced to
death, allowed to "sweat" for a couple of weeks, their sentence then
being commuted to transportation "for the term of their natural
lives" (see Criminal Trials Register: National Archives).
James was placed in Springfield Gaol in Chelmsford (illustration)
and in 2014 the following information came to light ("Hertfordshire Mercury") which had been unknown to me in my 25 years of research
James was subsequently taken to the Convict ships or "Hulks" for a few months, his
transport ship "The Aurora" departing in June 1835 arriving in Hobart, Tasmania
on 8th October 1835.
Early Hobart
A description was taken of James on arrival. In summary he was "a Ploughman; Height
5ft 7ins; Age 22; Complexion Brown; Hair Dark brown; Face Freckled; Native
Place Farnham"
He was immediately assigned out to a local farmer, and
served out some twelve years before being given a Conditional Pardon on 8th October 1847. This left him free within the colony, but he
could not go home.
In any event, James had no wish to go home, because in 1845
(7th October) he married Jane Cox (a freewoman, from a local land owning
family) at St John's
Church in Launceston.
It is fair to say that in material terms the court that sent
James to Tasmania
did him a favour. Indeed, by the 1840s
many convicted criminals preferred transportation, it gave them the prospect of
a new life for freed convicts were given land allocations.
By 1860, James had been allocated some 50 acres of bushland
at Pipers River, by 1867 owning some 160 acres of land at The Black Sugar Loaf
at Westbury, while being the tenant of some 500 more (at the same place) owned
by the Crown. He held this land for the
rest of his life.
Jane was born in 1825, at Norfolk Plains, Tasmania.
The couple only had the three children,
because sadly Jane died of measles in 1854; she was 29.
James Ginn, "Farmer" died in 1885, aged 71. The cause of death was given as stricture.
James and Jane had three sons:
George - a farmer, married Sarah Bullock in 1869 and had Elizabeth, Jane, Sarah (d. infancy) and James by her. Sarah died in 1877 and George remarried Emma Hall in 1883 and had a further child, Emma by her. George (shown right below with son James) died in 1912, Emma dying the same year.
Arthur Alfred - married Louisa Sturzaker in 1876 and had Arthur (died infancy) Amelia, Hilda, Ethel, Ernest, David, Ella and Rita. A farmer, Arthur died in 1931 and Louisa in 1932
.
James - there were various family stories about what happened to James, the major one saying that he went blind. It has recently been discovered that his mother carried a genetic condition called Leber hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON) the gene passes down through the female line but the actual disease (which manifests itself with blindness between the ages of 20-30) usually only occurs in males. The majority of people who have the gene may never suffer from the illness.
James jnr acquired land and appears in various land records until 1878 when he was 26. It is likely that soon after this he went blind. The condition comes on suddenly and is untreatable even today. The likelihood is that he was placed in what was called the "Invalid Depot" in Launceston in Tasmania. Tasmania suffered from the fact that it had been established as a penal colony, had no welfare system equivalent to the local workhouse provision in England (inadequate as that was) and was run centrally with little compassion or empathy for people who could not look after themselves. The conditions in the Depot were very poor and run almost on military lines. Contemporary records of the Depot do not appear to survive, but the fact that the land that James held was put up for auction in 1880 indicates that he died that year - he was 28.
Acknowledgement - I am indebted to my friend Jennifer Clark (nee Ginn) a descendant of James, for the vast majority of what appears here in respect of what happened after James arrived in Tasmania
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