Bone and Beauty: The Ribbon Boys Rebellion

By Jeanette M. Thompson

October 1830Rebelling from years of maltreatment and starvation, a band of Ribbon Boys liberate eighty convicts from Bathurst farms and lead them inland towards freedom. Governor Darling, fearing that others would also rise up, sends the 39th Regiment in pursuit. Three bloody battles follow, but to whom will justice be served?Rich with detail, Bone and Beauty fuses archival evidence and narrative technique to tell the gripping story of the Ribbon Boys and their reputed leader Ralph Entwistle. For the first time, the influence of Irish secret societies, the scale of oppression and corruption, and the complex web of criminal and family relationships behind these events are revealed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Release date: Mar 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9780702262142

Book preview

Jeanette M. Thompson graduated as Doctor of Creative Arts from the University of Technology Sydney. Bone and Beauty grew out of Jeanette’s research into Australian colonial history and creative nonfiction writing. She has been a lecturer in children’s literature, Charles Sturt University, and a tutor for the Family History Unit, University of Tasmania. Her research and community writing have explored ways of making history accessible and engaging for a wide variety of audiences.

Contents

Map

1 The wages of rebellion

2 The origin of rebellion

3 Transportation

4 Convict life

5 Crimes and punishments

6 Tales of rebels

7 Freedom to move

8 Bolters and banditti

9 Rise of the Ribbon Boys

10 Murderous insurgents

11 A terrible gaiety

12 Vigilantes and volunteers

13 Mounted police

14 A military pursuit

15 Trust and treachery

16 Going beyond the limits

17 Death or liberty

18 Rounding up rebels

19 Faith and Fathers

20 Trial by military jury

21 Conscience and consequences

Postscript

Acknowledgements

Select bibliography

Author’s notes

The key locations of the Ribbon Boys’ insurrection

For Anthony Peter Thompson

All of true blood, bone and beauty … were doomed to Port McQuarie, Toweringabbie, and Norfolk Island and Emu Plain. And in those places of tyranny and condemnation, many a blooming Irishman rather than subdue to the Saxon yoke were flogged to death and bravely died in servile chains, but true to the Shamrock and a credit to Paddy’s land.

Ned Kelly’s ‘Jerilderie letter’, 1879

1

The wages of rebellion

Gaol, Bathurst Settlement, Monday 18 October 1830

Captain Horatio Walpole and his detachment of the 39th Regiment arrive from the Lachlan River with seven wounded captives; three others have been sent to Bong Bong. The foot soldiers executed a forced march from Sydney to Bathurst, where they were joined by a cavalcade of veteran soldiers, volunteer settlers and mounted police. Walpole has quelled the most wide-spread convict insurrection since the Castle Hill rebellion of 1804. After six days on the road, the wagon still leaks blood.

Incited by the death of the Irish folk hero Jack Donohoe, the rebels liberated eighty government servants from their Bathurst farms. They amassed enough arms, cattle and farming supplies to establish a hidden camp beyond the limits of the colony.

Ralph Entwistle looks out at the faces swarming like flies around the wounded. He sees Patrick Sullivan standing on the street gawping at his bleeding brethren. Martin Grady, riding close to Captain Walpole for protection, is unable to meet Ralph’s eyes. The Boys have been brought in, the infamous Ribbon Boys, and their wounds become them.

Ralph lifts his damaged body onto one buttock against the splintered wood. He cannot find the face of George Mole. He asks Robert Webster if he has seen the boy. Webster shakes his head and throws Ralph a look of caution. They are within earshot of Lieutenant Thomas Evernden, superintendent of the mounted police.

Those still able to walk – Robert Webster, John Kenny, James Driver and Dominic Daley – are herded off to the cells by Constable James Parker, an Irish lifer on his Ticket of Leave. Patrick Gleeson helps the wounded William Gahan hobble alongside the constable. They start giving him the patter in the hope he will go on one side for them or at least go light.

‘Now, why are the government servants calling you the Ribbon Boys?’ Parker asks.

Gahan whispers, ‘You have heard of the secret society sworn to punish all bad masters? Men who do dark deeds like arson and murder to avenge the Irish?’

Constable Parker cranes forward to trade in secrets. ‘Yes, the Ribbonmen?’

‘They say we are like them, but younger and more handsome.’ Gahan smiles with his crooked yellow teeth.

Gleeson laughs at this.

The men ask Parker about the fate of their wounded comrades Michael Kearney, Tom Dunne and John Sheppard. They were the first rebels captured by Lieutenant Macalister, who escorted them to the hospital in Argyle County. Parker has no news of their condition.

The Protestants, Driver and Webster, are thrown into the general lock-up. Ralph is carried on a pallet to a solitary cell. This separation from the Boys is his first punishment. Lieutenant Evernden regards him as the leader of the insurrection.

The first time Ralph Entwistle was incarcerated was in a cramped dungeon cell where he breathed in the foetid air of a dozen Lancashire men sweating fear. Here, his pallet rests upon a trundle bed on a dirt floor that has been swept clean with a branch of eucalyptus; the scent lingers. In New South Wales, prison walls are made of red bricks instead of ancient stones.

The iron door clangs as Constable Shaw Strange pulls the bolt and cracks it open. He slides a bowl of gruel into the cell, and secures the door again.

Ralph reaches over to grasp the bowl then hurls it against the wall. The peephole opens at the clatter and the constable surveys the mess.

‘Here is the temper that stole your liberty.’ He clucks. ‘Others starve so that you may eat.’

‘The magistrates eat while the convicts starve,’ Ralph replies.

Ralph’s body seems grotesque in this narrow room. A British bulldog by width and strength, grief has bowed his wide shoulders. He sits up, looking at his chafed ankles in their iron cuffs. He considers his injured leg. He cannot turn back the torn leg of his trousers; it has stuck to the crusted blood. His head pounds in time with his heart.

Ralph had not expected to live so long. He is twenty-six, only a year older than his mother was when she died. He unwinds her kerchief from his neck and, with his stumpy fingers, worries away at the satin threads. The letters ‘E. Lee’ have almost been picked clean.

2

The origin of rebellion

King Street, Bolton, Lancashire, Sunday 30 June 1811

Ralph was seven when his mother died. He remembers the muffled sound of a lullaby hummed through her breast and the crackle in her voice and the death rattle. She was laid out upon a table in the front room of their cottage, stiff as a sparrow after an early frost.

In the front window sat his grandfather’s loom. Ellen Lee had taken over the weaving when the old man died. She could make just enough money to feed them both. Ellen taught Ralph his letters so that he could read to her from the bible as she worked. She died from asthma. The doctor said the disease came from kissing the cotton thread through the shuttle.

On the day of the funeral, Ralph nestled under the old timber frame and would not come out. He could smell the waxiness of wear upon it, remember her clogs gliding across the floorboards, feel the sway of her body working the rhythm of the warp and woof as she sent the shuttle flying. The ribbons of cotton would sing amid the clatter and clack. He thought, I will sit at this loom until I die too.

‘I suppose the old thing must go now,’ said his Aunt Annie to the minister.

‘There is no market for hand looms these days,’ he replied.

‘Were it not the Reverend Cartwright invented the power looms and put good folk out of work so their families might starve?’ asked Aunt Annie.

‘I shall not take the loom, but I will have the cloth and the boy for the orphanage.’

‘That you will not,’ said Aunt Annie. ‘His father is alive and has work for him in the timber yard.’

Relatives scuttered like clouds across Ralph’s vision that morning – his four older half-brothers, his aunt and uncle, two married half-sisters, and finally his sobbing father. Ralph did not recognise him until he was told to kiss him.

The minister led the procession down the lane and the neighbours shed tears as rare as chicken’s teeth over the poor little boy following along behind. The family reached the stony churchyard. After prayers at the graveside, the men took up the ropes and lowered the coffin down into a narrow pit. The minister picked up a clod of earth and threw it upon the lid of the coffin.

Ralph was outraged. He picked up a rock and threw it at the minister. It glanced off his brow and he swooned to the ground. The world was in an uproar. The women attended to the stricken man of God. Ralph’s father, Thomas, was at once upon the boy and struck him so hard across the ear it split.

‘What has possessed the boy?’ he demanded of Aunt Annie.

‘She might be breathing yet!’ Ralph shouted despite the pain ringing in his head.

‘She is sleeping, Ralph, but nothing will wake her now,’ said Aunt Annie.

Thomas Entwistle turned away from the grave. The older men took Thomas to The Old Man and Scythe while Aunt Annie took the minister to the rectory. The gravedigger filled in the hole. Ralph sat by the turned earth and made a cross of sticks to mark the place where the box was buried. The only thing he kept of his mother’s was her handkerchief.

Church Gate, Bolton, Lancashire, Tuesday 26 September 1826

Late one autumn afternoon in 1826, a stranger called Andrew Kirkman came to the timber yard on Church Gate asking for Ralph’s father, Thomas Entwistle. Kirkman looked and sounded to be a young Scottish gentleman on business. Kirkman offered Ralph a promissory note made out to the value of twenty pounds. He wanted to cash it through the timber yard books.

‘My father was taken for holding a Scottish note such as this,’ Ralph said, handing it back firmly.

‘Taken, you say? How long since?’

‘Five years past,’ said Ralph. The timber yard owners had said at the trial that the only trade that ran in Ralph’s family was forgery. His Aunt Annie had been sent down for it the year after Ralph’s mother died, his cousin had passed a forged note and his father had been caught with one in his possession. Ralph’s father had been banished to Van Diemen’s Land for life. The owners kept Ralph on at the yard only to lift and carry the heavy timbers. There was no one as strong as Ralph left to do the work. He was not allowed in the office. Every winter, when orders were low, he was laid off and had to take poor relief. Autumn was blowing more dry leaves into the yard every day.

‘My information must have been incorrect,’ said the gentleman, taking Ralph by the arm and leaning confidentially towards him. ‘Let me apologise for my mistake, make some amends.’

Ralph understood that Kirkman was buying his silence concerning the note. He was interested in what Kirkman might be good for. A tankard of ale and a pork pie would be a banquet to him. Ralph allowed himself the luxury of being cajoled.

Kirkman stepped neatly down the lane with Ralph following. Kirkman wore a ten-shilling hat and a smart blue coat. Ralph’s coat was green. It was the only object his father had left behind and its weight and verdigris came from the copper filings that had burrowed into its fibres. Ralph had worn it in all weathers and the stitches were now loose in their holes. In The Old Man and Scythe, Ralph’s lumbering body was almost too large for the confidential nook into which Kirkman had secreted himself. He ordered food and ale. Hunger had begun to gnaw away at Ralph’s ribs. Three weavers from the mill stood at the bar. They eyed the stranger with suspicion.

‘You seem in need of a new coat, if I may be so forward,’ said Kirkman as Ralph bit into a pie.

‘This one was my father’s,’ said Ralph, swilling the ale. Kirkman did not eat with him but drank French wine from a tin cup.

‘I know a man at the Manchester markets who could be on the look-out for a new coat for you, my friend. He trades in items of clothing and bolts of cloth.’

Ralph’s stomach ached from the richness of the food.

‘I have made arrangements for a wealthy merchant, James Alldred on the Tyldesley Road, to supply such items to the man in Manchester,’ said Kirkman.

‘Bolts of cloth and coats.’

‘And I am sure we could find one for you, but alas I do not have the constitution to carry such heavy items.’

‘Would Mr Alldred not have men to deliver your purchases?’

‘Oh, there is no word of purchase or notes. This is strictly an exchange of goods. I foolishly made an arrangement to pick up the items this evening not knowing how far Bolton is from Tyldesley. I have a cart.’

‘Tonight?’

Kirkman nodded to the barmaid for more ale.

‘Nothing could be easier than the lawful entry of the gentleman’s house through the back door. The cloth and items of clothing are stored in the laundry cupboard. There is no need to go upstairs at all. No need to disturb the young family.’

‘James Alldred has given you the keys?’

‘The scullery maid will leave them on the gate post in the laneway, once the family are settled for the evening.’

Ralph wondered what it would be like to seduce a scullery maid. He could imagine Kirkman’s slender arms pulling her into the silk and satin of his inner garments.

Kirkman wanted Ralph for his strength. In Ralph’s broad brow he read forethought, in his lobed ears honesty and in his soft mouth a certain type of gullibility. Kirkman, on the other account, had no ear lobes and shrewd small eyes. To the barmaid observing the parley, Kirkman’s criminality was as evident as Ralph’s innocence. After three pints of ale and two pork pies, they left the tavern arm in arm.

Lancaster Castle Prison, Lancashire, Monday 15 January 1827

It was the adventure with Andrew Kirkman that saw Ralph Entwistle imprisoned in Lancaster Castle four months later. He was arrested on the moors and marched by a watchman to the shire prison in Lancaster to await the convening of the court for the spring Assizes.

On the day Ralph arrived, the Claughton poachers were being brought into the Castle. More than two hundred spectators lined the sharp slope up to the Castle gates to glimpse the murderers. One had a peg leg like a veteran of war. The hungry and maimed soldiers had returned in their thousands from France and Spain, but they could find no work. The meadows, where they used to freely snare rabbits and shoot pheasants, were enclosed by wealthy landowners. These six poachers had shot a gamekeeper, and in the cells they would join two gamekeepers who had killed a poacher. The man’s leg had been crushed by a mantrap at Garstang.

Ralph was marched into a vast courtyard. The largest structure was the square Castle Keep and around its base was a skirt of Gothic arches used by the debtor’s wives to promenade. Their children cast curious eyes over the poachers. There was a well and trough at the centre of this acre of ground. Across the dirt quadrangle, a gaggle of female prisoners jeered and gestured suggestively through the iron railings.

The men’s prison was cut off from the rest by a tall wall overseen by the turnkey’s lodge. Once inside the turnkey’s gates, Ralph was sent into a smaller, triangular courtyard where his head was shaved and he was doused with a bucket of cold water. His clothes, filthy from the journey, were burned. Thomas Higgin, the head gaoler, handed Ralph a set of brown woollen trousers, two shirts, a jacket, a waistcoat, two nightcaps, a pair of wooden clogs and some underdrawers.

Ralph told the gaoler, ‘If the parish could clothe the poor, there would be fewer thieves.’

At the wide end of the courtyard stood a four-storey Gothic tower. The corridor on each floor was pitted with eight windowless cells, each with a ventilation hole above the door. Four other men were pushed into the cell behind Ralph, and the heat of their bodies made the air dense and stifling. Ralph took up a place in the corner so that his sides were guarded by stone. A weaver called James Shorrock claimed the bunk that Ralph had taken but said he would share it with him. He had already been sentenced to death for his part in destroying power looms in the Turner’s Mill at Bury. He told Ralph he had been held over for another trial in March for his riotous work at Blackburn in Garsden’s Mill.

Ralph could hear the muffled peals of the church bells tolling through the night to mark the recent death of Frederick, the Duke of York. Ralph wondered if the old Duke would rest in a grave as black and miserable as this.

Breakfast was porridge, every day at eight thirty, followed by chapel. By March there were still almost five hundred prisoners in the Castle, the transportees sentenced at the August assizes not having yet been sent away. Ralph was put to work carrying bricks on a hod to repair the courtyard wall. Others were tailoring to earn their keep. Some carved ivory or made parquetry boxes – skills brought into the gaol by the French prisoners of war. Shorrock was put on the treadmill that powered the looms for weaving calico.

The main meal was served at twelve thirty – a cow shin for every fourteen prisoners, boiled to a quart of stew for each man. Ralph was grateful for his morsel of food, and for the first time since his father had been taken away, he had full employment.

Lancaster Castle Courts, Lancashire, Monday 12 March 1827

On Monday morning, Ralph was moved with a large group of men to the dungeon cells beneath the medieval hall and the courts. These were the darkest holding cells, hewn from sandstone blocks wedged in the breech between the outer Castle walls. An iron grate above the dungeon door admitted light, but when the cell door was closed the darkness was complete. This stone box held up to twenty men, all ironed with six-pound cuffs so that they could safely be taken up to trial at any time.

Ralph’s cell mates traded confessions as if to get their testimony straight for the judge or receive a reprieve from their fellow prisoners. One of the old gamekeepers said he had merely winged a poacher but the wound turned to gangrene and the victim died within a month.

Thomas Varley, a veteran poacher of thirty-four years, said, ‘You must swing for it.’

Henry Foxcroft claimed to be a highwayman rather than a common thief. There were three forgers and three sheep and cattle stealers, all of whom well knew what they were doing. The other three were honest men, weavers caught up in the riots of the previous April.

That afternoon, Ralph was led, manacled and unshaven, along the dungeon tunnel and up a winding set of stone stairs. He stepped from the foetid darkness into the dock of the courtroom. It was a tall room lined with mahogany panelling. The bright light filtering down from the high windows buzzed with dust motes. It felt to Ralph like a church but without the apprehension of the light of God softening through rose glass. Instead, the sun beat in on rolls of manuscript and ink pots with quills and a scurry of court scriveners littering the space between Ralph and the magistrate’s bench.

There were faces in the witness box Ralph recognised: three weavers who had often been his drinking companions from Bolton. For a moment it surprised Ralph that they had come this far to watch, until he realised they would give evidence. His mouth went dry. Twelve local men sat in the jury box; none smiled.

The trapdoor in the floor behind Ralph gave another creak and a gaoler brought up the next prisoner. Andrew Kirkman emerged from the dark hole. With his head shaven and hunger pinching his face, Ralph barely recognised the man. Their eyes met momentarily but Kirkman looked away. Kirkman’s information had led to Ralph’s arrest. Ralph turned back to the gallery with a clenched jaw. He had been bought for small beer and two pork pies.

The magistrate’s bench was a throne covered by a carved canopy, overshadowed by the massive painting of King George III astride a rampant white horse. Sir John Bayley blazed into the courtroom like a red and white meteor of regalia. He took his chair beneath the portrait. There followed a flurry of black ravens in white wigs and a clattering of clerks as the judge ran over the list.

Kirkman was thrust to the railing beside Ralph and he could smell the sweat of Kirkman’s fear. The charge was read aloud: ‘Ralph Entwistle, labourer, and Andrew Kirkman, labourer, about the hour of twelve of the night of 26 September 1826 with force and arms in the Parish of Leigh did enter the dwelling house of one James Alldred feloniously and burgulariously to steal, take and carry away two coats of the value of one pound, one great coat of the value of ten shillings, one other coat of the value of ten shillings, and one gown piece to the value of five shillings, one piece of cotton cloth to the value of five shillings, two pair of trousers to the value of ten shillings, three shirts to the value of ten shillings, one silk handkerchief of the value of one shilling and two keys to the value of one penny.’

Asked how the prisoners would plead, each replied ‘Not guilty’ and dared not look one at the other.

First James and then Alice Alldred took the witness stand. The Alldreds confirmed that Entwistle had been found in the house. When Mrs Alldred called to the intruder from the stairs, he ran from the open back door into the laneway. The night watchman, who had just called the hour, scuffled with Kirkman in the garden and knocked off his hat. Entwistle tripped because he was encumbered by the swag of clothing he was carrying. The watchman made a grab for him and ripped the pocket from his coat. Both men made off down the lane.

Examining the evidence, the judge concluded that the case rested upon the positive identification of the items taken by the night watchman – the pocket torn from the coat, and the hat. Ralph felt safe because his coat had been burned in the prison courtyard. Then the weavers from the tavern were called and each attested they had seen Ralph many times in a coat of that material and shade. Weavers had excellent recollections of cloth, colour and pattern. They could not swear that the hat produced was positively Kirkman’s, it being similar to many of the light cotton hats worn in the summer.

Within thirty minutes, the jury were asked for their verdict and the judge pronounced his judgement: ‘Ralph Entwistle to be hanged by the neck until he be dead. Andrew Kirkman, not guilty.’

A great cheering broke out, apparently among Kirkman’s friends in the gallery and he was immediately set free from the dock. Ralph was sent down the dungeon steps from whence he had come. The weight of his sentence took time to sink into his consciousness. All he could see were the stone steps