The Wall Family: Weaving the Threads of Memories

By Christine Leonard

This story explores the Walls through four generations in colonial Van Diemen's Land, and Central Victoria when it was still part of New South Wales. William Wall, a 17-year-old groomsman, was transported to Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania, in 1835 as an assigned servant. Twice married, fathering 19 children, and with significant support from his free-settler wives, Mary Long, and Eliza Clarke, William became a farmer, publican, and inn-keeper. The book covers the 'Currency', William's 13 surviving children born of convict stock, and their descendants and how each generation assumed its place in colonial society over a period spanning 180 years. The paperback is 171 pages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christine Leonard
• Release date: Sep 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9780645325614

Book preview

Part One: The Convict William ‘Cocky’ Wall

10 May 1817–23 September 1894 D. aged 77 years

art

What’s in a name? In the Wall family, there are several instances of children named after a grandparent, parent, uncle, aunt, or even a deceased older sibling. Two names on the male side that stand out and potentially cause confusion are William and Randolph.

There are four Williams, the first being William Lamb, married to Martha (neé Whall), who gave her name to their convict son. William ‘Cocky’ Wall had two sons named William; the first dying aged 11 months, the second, William Lamb Wall jnr, appears in Part Two The Currency, along with several other Williams of subsequent generations.

Randolph appears nine times throughout four generations. The name is a first name or at least preferred name by four men, starting with James Randolph, son of William ‘Cocky’ Wall, born in 1857. Five other Wall men have Randolph as a middle name.

On the female side, Martha, Margaret, Gertrude, Eliza, and Lily, also have their proponents.

Timeline of key events up to Van Diemen’s Land

Introduction

I have benefited in so many ways from general research done on William’s story long before my father’s family piqued my interest. In 2019, to better understand convict life in colonial Australia, where William was assigned following transportation, and where he lived, my research took us around the Victorian districts of Warrnambool, Wangoom, and Hexham, and on to Tasmania in the same year. The following year in 2020, we travelled through central Queensland, where two Wall sons settled. Tracing the footsteps of my great-great-grandparents included meetings with historians, researchers in State Archives, and welcoming residents in communities, small country towns, and cities.

Acknowledging that my approach was limited, I have included sections on Aboriginal people, to encourage greater awareness of the impacts colonial Australia had on First Nations people, and to better understand the context of the times that our ancestors lived.

Part One focuses on the groomsman from Norfolk, England. No sooner does William land in awful trouble as a 17-year-old in Lincolnshire than he addresses himself by his mother’s family name – Wall or Whall. The situation does not change until his first child is born in a far-away land. Having attained his freedom and a wife, William tries to correct the anomaly with his father’s name Lamb. But it is too late for that, and the name Wall, our name, remains.

William was twice married and fathered 19 children. With significant support from wives Mary Long and Eliza Clarke, William established multiple business enterprises, creating opportunities for a large family before his passing at 77 years in Hexham Victoria. There is little to no documentation on the contributions of Mary and Eliza, but their strength and abiding support bear out in the family’s journey and, ultimately, the resilience and confidence that shines through in the next generation.

England, where it all started

The central character of our line in Australia is a man we know as William Wall. William’s transportation to Van Diemen’s Land in 1835 was the catalyst that broke all direct links to his home country and family. The mystery behind the circumstances of William’s arrest is why he used his mother’s family name and not his father’s. It is William’s mother, Martha Whall, who travels to Horncastle to rescue her son; an extraordinary woman who we never get to know fully or give her sufficient voice in her son’s story.

Through the records of William’s incarceration and trial, we learned Martha Whall (born in 1782) was William’s mother and that she was wife to William Lamb (born in 1781), father of William ‘Cocky’ Wall.

William Lamb (our William’s father), born on 31st January 1781 in Norwich, England, was a son of Norfolk through his parents William Lamb snr and Ann Trull. The Lambs and Trulls had been Norfolk people since the mid-1500s coming mainly from the City of Norwich. William Lamb married Martha Whall in the Church of England on Christmas Day of 1804 in Norwich. Witnesses to the marriage were George and John Lamb, likely William’s brothers.

William Lamb and Martha Whall’s son, William, was born on 10th May 1817. He was their fifth child, with two more brothers following. On William’s birth record, his father’s occupation was lace weaver, whereas by the following year, the Pool Book for the Parish of St. John Maddermarket in the City of Norwich describes William Lamb as a framework knitter. He was in the same occupation in 1830. William the son, became a groom and labourer.

The Lincolnshire town of Horncastle is an old Roman town with evidence of earlier settlements dating back to The Bronze Age. According to the Horncastle History and Heritage Society’s website, the Horncastle horse fair was once known as the Great August Horse Fair. By the 1300s, Lincolnshire was the leading horse-breeding district in the country with most farmers breeding horses to sell at the Horncastle Fair.

The Fair was at its height in the mid-19th century and ran for about two weeks. Inns with adequate stabling were required and horses could be accommodated at 35 inns throughout the town. By the end of that century, 1,000 horses could be stabled at the inns (Silverton, 2020).

The traceable story of young William surfaces when as a 17-year-old groomsman come labourer, he is arrested on 29th October 1834 during the annual horse fair. William’s job as a groomsman must have taken him to Horncastle that year, where horse-trading and all the associated activities saw lots of cash passed about. According to Court Clerk and Justice of the Peace the Reverend John Dymoke’s report, written on the day of the arrest, William attempted to assault and rob a farmer, Mr James Scrooby, of £60 while in a crowd watching a fight in the back of the Vine Beer House in Horncastle.

Scrooby was a mature-aged farmer from Belchford who carried an extraordinary amount of cash in his pocket that day, implying he was a successful farmer and gentleman of influence. Scrooby’s damning testimony against William was supported by a witness, Mr James Marshall, who was a farmer from Langton, who also happened to be the constable of Langton.

William denied the charges of felony, asserting he was leaning over the man’s shoulders to watch a fight when the gentleman grabbed him by the collar accusing him of trying to rob him. Court documents support Marshall’s occupation as a constable and farmer from Langton and given the prosecution witness’s status, William’s defence case was weak.

Martha’s father, John Whall, is referred to as Wall and Whall concurrently in various records. The reasoning for William using his mother’s maiden name is a conundrum. Sometime in early 1835 or perhaps late 1834, Martha Lamb (neé Whall) travelled from Norwich to Horncastle to fight against her son’s transportation order. She stayed in a guest house in Millstone Street owned by Francis and Ann Marshall.

Between 23rd January and mid-February 1835, Martha put together a petition seeking clemency for her son with an accompanying letter to the Right Honourable Lord Goulburn dated 18th February. The petition was supported by 33 citizens of Horncastle, all willing to vouch for the lad’s good character. The aim of the petition was to seek clemency for William on several grounds, such as mistaken identity, an assertion that the witness for the prosecution was intoxicated, and while held in Spilsby Prison, the lad had shown good conduct (The National Archives, n.d.).

By this stage, William was incarcerated on a prison hulk at Woolwich. Throughout this horrific episode, Martha used her family name, Whall, and not Lamb, for reasons unknown.

How was it that Martha took this journey alone? William was an outdoors man of action and purpose, with a wild temperament evidenced by his fearless approach to the boom-and-bust cycles he would find himself in the future. Would such a man follow in his father’s footsteps tethered to the click and clack of a weaver’s loom in dark and damp confines of a cottage room or factory floor? The Wall men I’ve come to know and grown up with, are outdoorsmen, horsemen, farmers, men of action, schemers, and dreamers, resilient, stubborn, and determined.

Imagine a scenario of growing rows between old bull and young bull, the testing of wills and demands fall on deaf ears to follow a path predictably laid out, filling one’s place at the table of toil and drudgery.

An eager yet stubborn man-child chafes at the bit towards the world yonder, to run free as the horses he loved. A father’s refrain resonates with forbidding resolve turn away, and ye’ll not darken this doorway again! hangs in the air. The gauntlet of my way or no way has been a lance thrown at the disappearing backs of my Wall menfolk. There is no evidence such a scene played out except for recognition of such traits in my father’s father, and I suspect the father before him.

Transcript of Martha’s letter:

Horncastle February 18th 1835

To the Right Honorable Lord Golburn

I address you in a poor but humble manner being the mother of William Whall, a convict know [sic] lying at Woolwich on board of the Ganymede Hulk expecting to sail every day. There has been a petition forwarded from the inhabitants of Horncastle begging Your Lordship to consider something for the convict. It was forwarded on the … Of the month if your Lordship would be so kind to investigate the punishment of Transportation on board the Hulk or any other place where it would please Your Lordship. Your answer will be graciously received by me

Your Humble Servant Martha Whall

PS Please to direct for me to be left at Franscis Marshall’s Millstone Street Horncastle

Transportation

From the start of the nineteenth century, Britain had the harshest penal code in Europe, and even as late as 1837, there were still 200 crimes punishable by transportation (McKay, 1958, p.13). Britain had been transporting convicts to its American colonies from 1654, but with the outbreak of the American Wars of Independence in 1775, the system was forcibly curtailed until the First Fleet to Australia set sail in 1788. Due to the excessive number of prisoners incarcerated before 1788, decommissioned ships were being re-assigned to house prisoners and were subsequently referred to as prison hulks. Between 1776 and 1795, more than one-third of the 5,722 prisoners died on prison hulks. By 1830, ten prison hulks housed 4,400 prisoners, of which 64 per cent of this number were transported or were awaiting transportation to Australia.

In 1820 surgeon Peter Cunningham described the conditions he found; ‘two rows of sleeping berths, one above the other extend on each of the lower decks. Each berth being 6 foot square and calculated to hold four convicts, everyone thus possessing 18 inches space to sleep in – an ample space too’.

On 13th January 1835, William, now 18, was sentenced to seven years with transportation to Van Diemen’s Land. For seven months, he was first held on the prison hulk HMS Ganymede in the Thames River at Woolwich. Prior to British capture in February 1809, the ship was a French frigate Hebe. The Ganymede was decommissioned in 1819 and converted to a prison hulk before eventually being broken up in 1838 (Wiki, 2020) .

One of 269 male convicts, William was transferred to the Layton, which departed from Sheerness on 26th August 1835. No female convicts travelled on this voyage. The 510-tonne three-masted barque was built in 1813 and described as ‘square sterned with two decks and no gallery’ (Oldman, 2020). After 103 days, the Layton arrived in Hobart Town on 10th December 1835. The ship’s master was Giles Wade and surgeon Mr George Birnie (Symonds, 2012).

The following remarks are extracted from the Surgeon Superintendent’s medical journal:

Two died on board during the voyage, and two in a state of convalescence were sent to the Hospital at Hobart Town the day after our arrival; all the rest were landed in a clean and healthy state on the 16th December 1835.

The diseases which occurred during the voyage were such as usually occur among landsmen when first going to sea, or during a long voyage. The prisoners with few exceptions conducted themselves well, much more trouble was experienced from the guards than from them. One of the soldiers’ wives was delivered of a male child on the 1st October 1835, both have done well (National Archives, Medical Journal of the Layton, 1835).

The Layton had a crew of 40, ‘accompanied by a guard of 30 rank and file drawn largely from the 28th Foot Regiment under the command of Lieutenant A. Wilkinson of the 13th Light Infantry. Second Lieutenant Andrews, supported Wilkinson. Andrews of the 21st Fusiliers and three sergeants of 28th Foot’. Nine soldiers accompanied by their wives and nine children were also on board along with four free passengers: Captain Roger Kelsall of the Royal Engineers with servant Andrew Moore, and Robert Howe, Clerk of Works, with his wife, Harriet. These passengers disembarked with the guards in Sydney (J. Bear). William was appointed boatswain during the voyage but subsequently demoted due to bad behaviour, and yet, his conduct on the prison hulk was recorded as ‘good’.

Van Diemen’s Land

The convict assignment system commenced in 1803 and continued to 1839 when private settlers and landholders took on a convict, becoming responsible for their food, clothing, and lodging (Tasmania, n.d.). In September 1803, the first British settlement was established at Risdon Cove, north of Hobart Town, where the first convicts landed on Van Diemen’s Land soil. Armed hostilities (commonly termed as the Black Wars) with Aboriginal people commenced in earnest in 1804, and by 1835 had all but concluded with most of the Aboriginal population forcibly removed to Flinders Island in Bass Strait. The conflicts that raged from 1824 to 1831 were primarily a result of Aboriginal alienation from their lands; however, the increased violence and kidnapping of Aboriginal women and children triggered retaliatory attacks on white settlements and isolated individuals. There were purported ‘six times as many white men in the colony as women, and almost none of the latter were available to frontiersmen’ (Clements, 2014). Stories about sealers kidnapping Aboriginal women and taking them back to island camps are well-documented.

Convict life

The colonies in Australia were a critical solution for the overcrowded jails and prison hulks in Britain.

As the colonies and settlements expanded with free settlers bringing their own ideals to the new land, colonial governments faced the growing tensions of running a self-sufficient penal colony and governing for and meeting the expectations of an expanding emigrant free-settler community.

A convict’s labour theoretically was not the personal property of an employer to be bought and sold privately. They were assignees or bonded servants (a common term) often transferred to private individuals with government approval. Employers were required to submit annual returns to the government of the convicts in their care, fees applied, and it was possible to lose an assignee in the event of unwarranted maltreatment (McKay, 1959, pp. 16-17). It was through such records that descendants traced William Wall’s journey while still a convict or assignee.

The 20th December 1837 census record confirms that William Wall was an assigned servant working for Charles McLachlan Esquire and living at his Newlands Estate with one other convict, Edward Roberts.

Three employers

William was first assigned as a bonded servant to Charles McLachlan Esquire, one of the colony’s leading businessmen, who had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1824. McLachlan ran a shipping service between Scotland and Australia under the auspices of the Australian Company, which brought many of the early free Scottish settlers to the colony. The company owned several warehouses, but McLachlan was also involved in many other activities such as whaling, banking, politics, and becoming a member of the colony’s Legislative Assembly. Charles McLachlan’s home in Hobart Town was Newlands Estate, a 10-acre property located on the town’s northern