CRADLEY LINKS
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Richard's mother Jemima had died four years earlier, leaving his father James with five children to bring up as well as earn a meagre living as a nailor. As a 12 year old child in 1815, James and his five brothers and sisters and their parents William and Lydia, were the subject of a Removal Order from Cradley to Halesowen, under the Poor Law. The Order was quashed but even now, 45 years later, this family were still not strangers to poverty. By 1849, James' father William was a widower too, aged 74 years, a nailor/pauper, living in Colley Lane with two children and three grandchildren.
The two lads walked along Oldnall Road and the scene rapidly changed to open countryside. They made their way along the lane towards Pargeter's Farm at Foxcote, just a mile or two from where they lived, and in a fateful moment decided to take a sheep to feed their families.
Caroline Elizabeth Pargetter was a landed proprietor and farmer of 40 acres at Foxcote Farm. She lived there with her cook and dairymaid, housemaid, waggoner and two servants. Richard and Thomas's decision to relieve her of a sheep was not their best decision and they bungled the act. They were caught, jailed and tried at Worcester Epiphany Sessions on 31st December 1849.
Their crime was to have feloniously killed one wether sheep, property of Caroline Pargetter, with intent to steal the carcass. They were each sentenced to 10 years transportation.
Richard Bennett would have had some idea of what was in store for him, mainly from hearsay but also because he was not the first Cradley man to be transported. In 1838, 22-year old Joseph Bloomer of High Town, Cradley (son of Isaac Bloomer and Lucy Cox) was transported to Sydney, Australia. He and Ferdinando Shakespeare, both nailors, had been indicted for breaking into the shop of William Cox at Cradley and stealing an amount of bacon, cheese and other articles. Both were sentenced to 10 years transportation. Richard was only 8 years old at this time, but it is likely that the sentence handed out to Joseph would have been known "around town", if only as a handed-down warning to other youngsters of what could be their lot too.
He worked a 12-hour day, six days a week, starting every day with cleaning out his cell, and perhaps the corridors as well. Most of the convicts confined at Millbank were employed as tailors of one sort or another. They were instructed in making soldiers' clothing, biscuit-bags, hammocks, and miscellaneous articles for the army and navy, and other prisons, as well as the shirts, handkerchiefs, and cloth coats and trousers worn by the prisoners themselves. The cells were well ventilated, and the prison generally kept scrupulously clean, but the site of the building was low and marshy, and its dampness rendered it very unhealthy. In fact, there were ten times as many cases of illness, and three times the rate of deaths, in proportion to the prison population, as at the Hulks, to one of which Richard was later transferred before his journey.
Richard remained at Millbank Prison until March 1851, at which time the inspectors of the prison reported to the Home Secretary recommending the place of transportation. On 10 March he was sent to the hulk ship 'Warrior' anchored in the River Thames near Woolwich Dock, in time to be enumerated there on the 1851 census. On arrival he was described as "healthy".
Many prisoners served their entire sentence on the hulks. Most, like Richard, were housed there until a space could be found on a transport ship to Australia.
When transportation to the American colonies came to a sudden end after the war of independence in 1776, convicts sentenced to transportation were confined in old naval ships around the English coast. Intended as a temporary measure only, detention on the hulks lasted for 80 years.
The first hulks were moored on the Thames off Woolwich and the opposite shore, from 1776 onwards. On the southern shore, the Woolwich Warren was a maze of workshops, warehouses, wood-yards, barracks, foundries and firing ranges. The Warren had been the site of naval shipbuilding since the 16th century. The Royal Arsenal was not established there until 1805, but military arms had been made there for more than a century. These facilities were gradually being expanded and an adequate river harbour was essential if development of the Woolwich Warren was to continue.
The convicts were put to work improving the river. The main jobs were dredging the river to stop the drift of its main channel toward the centre of the river, using the spoil to raise the level of the Arsenal's marshy ground, and driving in posts to protect the riverbanks from erosion. Convict labour was also used for digging the canals and building the walls around the Arsenal and the nearby docks. The convicts worked long hours on the banks of the Thames and at the dockyards at Woolwich: 10 hours during summer, 7 in the winter.
Because of the isolated position of the hulks, convicts were less able than prisoners ashore to arrange visits from family and friends. The prisoners had to live on one deck that was barely high enough to let a man stand up. They were poorly dressed as well as unhealthy. The quality of the prisoners' food was kept as low as possible. Sometimes, the captain of a hulk would allow the convicts to plant vegetables in plots near the Arsenal. This attempt to add something extra to the poor diet of the prisoners depended on the goodwill, or otherwise, of the individual in charge.
Hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of convicts died aboard the hulks at Woolwich and their corpses were unceremoniously dumped in the Arsenal's marshground. On a still, warm day the smell of the prisoners, dead and alive, would pollute the river from bank to bank. The hulks lined the river like a floating shantytown.
After his second spell in Millbank Richard was transferred to Plymouth, from where he sailed on the Lady Montagu on 9 August 1852, one of 290 convicts destined for Van Dieman's Land ("VDL"), 10 of whom died on the journey. The ship arrived in Hobart Town 122 days later, on 9 December 1852 at a time when transportation was coming to an end.
Conditions in VDL were quite depressed at this time. There was little work and wages were low. The island had become a giant prison camp with over 70,000 transportees living there. Local opposition to the continued landing of convicts in Van Dieman's Land was growing, mirrored by protests in England against the harsh system. The discovery of gold in Victoria and New South Wales on the Australian mainland in the early 1850s fuelled the British Government's reluctance to continue funding the transport of convicts. Convict transportation came to an end in 1853.
Richard was one of the last of more than 74,000 convicts transported to the Australian Island State alone, later re-named Tasmania, over a period of some 41 years.
Under the Probation system that continued until the end of transportation, convicts were assigned to Probation Stations all over the island, and had to work for the government until they had earned a ticket of leave.
By 1847 there were 530 convicts in Cygnet, but in 1848 the number of convicts began to decline - probably by pardon and ticket of leave. By the time Richard arrived in 1854 the Probation Stations were already dismantled.
Notwithstanding "leaving the service of his master" in June 1854, for which he paid with one month's hard labour, he was granted a Ticket of Leave on 27 March 1855. Once granted his ticket, Richard was permitted to seek employment within a specified district but could not leave the district without the permission of the government or the district's resident magistrate. He was now permitted to marry and to acquire property. The ticket of leave had to be renewed annually, and he had to attend muster and church services.
A Conditional Pardon followed on 29 September 1857 which removed all restrictions except the right to leave the colony. Finally, on 30 October of the same year, Richard received his Certificate of Pardon. By this time he was established in Cygnet.
Despite the horrors of Millbank Prison, the hulk Warrior and a four month journey to the other side of the world, it is fair to say that the rest of Richard's life was in many ways probably better than that he would have experienced had he stayed in Cradley at that time. He would have had a good life in a very rural part of Tasmania that is about as different as anywhere could be from our Cradley in the nineteenth century. His great grandaughter remembers her mother telling her what a lovely gentle man he was.
It is probable that from at least the day of his trial in Worcester on the last day of 1849 Richard never saw or had any contact with any member of his family again. It is almost inconceivable that he received visitors from Cradley whilst in prison in London, and he could barely read or write. He died of old age on 19 December 1895, 46 years after he failed to steal a sheep from Pargeter's Farm near Cradley in the Black Country. Margaret survived him until 1911 when on 15 December she died at the New Town Charitable Institution in Hobart.
Today the farmers of Cygnet (population: circa 900) still rely on dairy cattle, apple orchards, mixed farming and saw milling for their economic livelihood. There are three pubs, two petrol stations, a Bank (but no ATM), a supermarket, cafes, a hardware store, a couple of backpackers hostels and a camping ground. There are several art studios, a print workshop with an old print press, a library linked to the collection of the State Library of Tasmania and a museum. Events in Cygnet include the the Cygnet Folk Festival, some film festivals and art exhibitions. David Coad has an excellent web site devoted to the people of Cygnet.
