Robert Stolladay (1804-1862) and Mary Anne McGuigan.
My 3rd great-grand uncle.
Every family has its share of black sheep and Robert Stolladay was one of ours. He suffered the horrors of transportation to Australia for burglary but forged a new life there, had a family and then died a miserable death.
The eldest child of James Stoliday and Mary Gay, Robert was born in 1804 and christened on 22 May in Mary’s home village of Ingworth, Norfolk.
His first recorded brush with crime was in 1824 when he was sentenced at Norfolk Assizes to six months imprisonment for larceny. The Bury and Norwich Post of 19 May 1824 reported that he’d been charged with stealing a pig belonging to a Christopher Livock of Sprowston in Norfolk and it wasn’t long after his release that he was in trouble again.
On 19 March 1825 Robert appeared at the Norfolk Assizes at Thetford and, as The Cambridge Chronicle and Journal reported on 1 April, had a sentence of death recorded against him for burglary at the home of Mr C Davy in Rackheath, Norfolk. He’d stolen 8lb of pork and other goods, and was one of many who faced the same sentence that day for equally trivial offences. The victim was doubtless the Christopher Davy mentioned in the 1821 Rackheath census, head of a household of five males and three females.
Were Robert’s offences the work of someone who was an habitual criminal, someone who was easily led astray or a poverty-stricken young man looking for his next meal? We’ll never know but while the Stollidays were undoubtedly poor, it was his second offence.
In Robert’s day, the terminology ‘a sentence of death was recorded against’ was considered a technicality that in reality meant that the convicted man or woman would be transported for a term on condition that they agreed.
Robert is mentioned in a letter dated 15 April 1825 from the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, to the justices of the Norfolk Circuit: “The following persons having been tried and convicted before you at the last Assizes holden in the Norfolk Circuit of the crimes hereafter mentioned, and had judgment of death recorded against them for the same… and you having by certificate under your hands humbly recommended them to His Majesty as fit objects for the Royal Mercy, on condition of their being transported beyond seas for and during the terms hereafter mentioned… His Majesty has thereupon been graciously pleased to extend the Royal Mercy to the said several persons on condition of their being transported to the coast of New South Wales or some one or other of the islands adjacent for and during the terms before mentioned, and has commanded me to signify the same to you may give the necessary directions accordingly.”
The letter downgraded Robert’s punishment to 14 years’ transportation and on 21 April, a letter from Peel to the High Sheriff of Norfolk instructed that they remove Robert and other convicts to the prison hulk Leviathan in Portsmouth. A week after that, on 28 April 1825, he arrived on the south coast.
The Bury and Norwich Post reported his move from Norwich Castle to Portsmouth in the edition of 4 May 1825.
HMS Leviathan was a 74-gun Third-rate ship of the line launched in 1790 at Chatham. It fought at the Battle of Trafalgar but was used as a prison hulk from 1816 to 1848. During his time on board, Robert’s gaolers reported on all the convicts and Robert’s record states: “Been convicted before. Bad connexions. Family have good character.”
The convicts were not left idle on the hulks as they awaited transportation to the young Australian colony. John Henry Capper, Superintendent of Ships and Vessels employed for the confinement of criminals, wrote: “The convicts confined on board the Leviathan, York and Hardy hulks, in Portsmouth harbour, have been employed in carrying on the public works under the naval and ordnance boards, and the principal officers of those departments have expressed their approbation of the prisoners’ conduct when on shore executing their tasks of labour.”
Records show Robert being discharged from the prison hulk to the Marquis of Hastings on 15 August 1825. It began its four-and-a-half month voyage to New South Wales on 22 August with Robert one of 152 convicts on board. The Master was William Ostler, the Surgeon George Rutherford. Also sailing with them were Colonial Secretary Alexander McLeay and a guard of 37 rank and file men of the 57th regiment.
The ship called at Rio de Janeiro on 2 November.
Surgeon Rutherford kept a Medical and Surgical Journal during the voyage and remarked that there were few cases of serious illness thanks mainly to the favourable season in which the ship sailed. Indeed, no convicts died and Robert was not mentioned in the list of those who’d been taken ill with such conditions as scurvy.
Rutherford wrote: “Knowing from former voyages what I had to expect by entering the cold southern latitudes before reaching the Cape, I considered it advisable to put into Rio de Janeiro for refreshments – little else could be done other than arresting the progress of the disease when it made its appearance up to that date by the usual means – liberating them from irons and obliging them to take exercise, keeping the prison clean, dry and ventilated and administering lime juice.”
The treatment of prisoners had advanced considerably since the early days of transportation, when cost-cutting and brutal masters often resulted in death and ships limping into Sydney with decks laden with sick men and women. No cases of scurvy turned up on the Marquis of Hastings after Rio.
The ship arrived in Port Jackson (aka Sydney Harbour) on 3 January 1826 – one of about 14 convict ships to arrive that year and at a time when Sir Ralph Darling had just been appointed as governor. It was the Marquis of Hastings’ first visit to the young colony but it would later return three more times, although not after Ostler had thrown himself overboard in an apparent fit of insanity. The convicts were finally marched ashore on 9 January.
The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser of 12 January 1826 reported that the men were not landed in the usual place in Sydney Cove but in the Government Domain in Farm Cove. “They were then conducted to the prisoners’ barracks in Hyde Park. His Excellency the Governor in Chief (Ralph Darling) inspected these men in the barrack-yard and was pleased to hold out to them the prospect of every proper encouragement, on condition of exemplary good behaviour, after which they were distributed throughout the country. The majority were forwarded to the interior by water for the purpose of accommodating the settlers, who have been so badly off for labourers for a considerable time past.”
Their arrival came almost 40 years after the First Fleet of transportees arrived in Australia in 1788.
From the the early days convicts were used as a labour force for both the government, as it sought to extend the youthful colony’s infrastructure, and private settlers. By the time Robert arrived in New South Wales, farming, grazing, commerce and a variety of other economic activities were in a healthy state and newly arrived convicts were in considerable demand.
Documents show that Robert was sent to Parramatta, up river from Sydney, for assignment. In the census of 1828 he was working as an assigned servant to Joseph Kenyon at a house called Woodlands. Specifically he was listed as a labourer, one of six in total. Kenyon, who also employed a gardener and a stockman who were both born in the colony, had arrived as a convict in 1816 but had made good and become an owner of property and land in the area.
Several documents from the time of Robert’s transportation mention that he had a very long scar on his right cheek – perhaps the result of some other trouble in his youth – and refer to the fact that he was a butcher by trade, but Robert’s surname also changed after this arrival to Holliday or Holladay. Whether this was a deliberate move on his part or just a simple transcription error that stuck is not known.
He’s listed as Holliday when he received permission to marry Belfast-born Mary Anne McGuigan in September 1831. By this time, he’d received his first Ticket of Leave (TOL) having been recommended by the Parramatta bench and approved on 30 July. A TOL gave convicts the freedom to work and live within a given district before their sentence expired or they were pardoned. TOL convicts could work for themselves and buy property but church attendance was compulsory and they needed permission to move to another district. Convicts applied through their masters to magistrates for a TOL and needed to have served a stipulated portion of their sentence before it was granted – Robert had only served 5 years or so in the Sydney area.
His marriage took place on 4 October at St John’s Church in Parramatta. Mary Anne was also a convict, born in Belfast, Ireland, in about 1812. She’d arrived at Sydney Cove on the Edward in 1829 having been sentenced to 7 years in March 1828 at Antrim for stealing cotton from the mill she worked at.
The couple had a daughter, Maria, at Parramatta on 18 November 1831 and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that Mary Anne was heavily pregnant when the couple wed.
Robert suffered a blow when his Ticket of Leave was cancelled, as reported in The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser of 17 January 1835, after he’d been caught illegally selling spirits. [Need to check Convict Indulgences records dated 13 Jan 1835 for Robert]
Mary got her Certificate of Freedom in 1835 and at the time was described as 5ft tall with a ruddy and freckled complexion, light brown hair and hazel eyes.
In 1839 Robert received another Ticket of Leave at Queanbeyan, which is now a town on the borders of New South Wales and the Capital Territory and had been discovered by Europeans in 1820. He was working as a vet but for some reason was listed as coming from Stepney. I’ve not been able to trace him in the 1841 census.
On 1 May 1849 he was finally granted his Certificate of Freedom at Queanbeyan. Described as a butcher, he stood 5ft 7ins tall, had a fresh complexion, brown hair and blue eyes.
But it wasn’t all good news for Robert. On 12 April 1848 he placed an advert in the The Sydney Morning Herald, which read: “I, Robert Holliday, of Corrawang do caution the public generally against harbouring or giving credit to my wife Mary Ann Holliday on my account, as I will not be accountable for any debts she may contract, she having left me since the 1st of November last, 1847. Corrawang, Maneroo.”
Whether they made up is not known but the Queanbeyan Age and General Advertiser of 22 March 1862 reported his death:
“A fatal accident, resulting in the death of one Robert Holliday, took place last week at Rolfe’s Station, Ironmungy. He had just left the head station with a dray of provisions for the shepherds at different parts of the run when the horses became unmanageable and he received some severe injuries, so that he was unable to move and was forty hours in the bush before found. He was conveyed to the Cooma Benevolent Asylum, where he died. Holliday was an old resident and well known on Monaro.”
His death certificate shows he died aged 57 as a result of injuries sustained by a cart overturning on him accidentally on 5 March. An inquest was held on the day he died – the 12th – and he was buried at Cooma the following day.
In November of that year a notice appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald (18 November edition).
“In the Supreme Court of New South Wales. In the goods of Robert Halliday, late of Maneroo in the colony of New South Wales, grazier, deceased. Application will be made to this honourable court that administration of the goods, chattels, credits and effects of the said deceased be granted to —-Hunt of Bell’s Creek, Braidwood, the daughter and only next of kin of the said deceased.”
A notice in The Manaro Mercury, and Cooma and Bombala Advertiser on 3 April 1863 revealed more about Robert: “House and allotment of land in Cooma. Mr W Ross has received instructions from Mr William Hunt, administrator, to the estate of the late Robert Halliday, to submit to public competition, at the Court House, Cooma, on Tuesday, April 14, a two-roomed house at the corner of Egan and Vale Streets together with the land attached thereto, being two roods and and eight perches.”
- Maria Holliday (1831-1884) was born at Parramatta on 18 November 1831 and baptised at St John’s Church there the following January. She married William Hunt at the church on 21 October 1846 and went on to have children with him. William was a convict who’d sailed on the Waterloo after being transported for life. On his request for permission to marry, Maria was described as a native of the colony and said to be aged 20. It’s obvious that her age was inflated to limit the age gap between her and husband-to-be, who was said to be 35. She died in 1884 and was buried at Braidwood Cemetery in New South Wales.
Robert’s isn’t the only Australian link in my ancestry and neither was Robert the only convict transported to Sydney…
Sources: Free settler or Felon. Convict Records. BMDs, census criminal records, Prison Hulk records, Convict Pardons and Tickets of Leave (for UK and Australia) at Ancestry.com and Findmypast.com, where I also accessed the British Newspaper Archive. Records confirmed at Norfolk Family History Society. Newspaper records at the National Library of Australia. Rackheath 1821 census