Black Sheep and Gold Diggers

By Barry Allan

Richard Venvill served five years of a seven year sentence for his part in the Swing Riots in Gloucestershire in 1830. He was an assigned convict in Van Diemens Land when he was pardoned in 1836.He moved to the mainland before Melbourne was founded and helped establish Ballark, one of the first sheep stations in the Port Philip District.
Joseph Allen was sentenced to ten years for assault and robbery in Glasgow in 1843. He became one of the 'Exiled' convicts sent to Melbourne and was pardoned upon arrival in 1846. He immediately became a policeman and then one of the original four detectives in Melbourne. In 1854 he was dismissed from the force and then became one of the discoverers of gold at Blackwood not far from Ballark.
The two men never met but some of their children did, and the families became linked. The book spans the years from 1830 to 1902 and follows them through their convict years, the settlement of Port Philip,the foundation of Melbourne, the gold rush and other events that affected their lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Allan
• Release date: Mar 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476476094

Barry Allan

Barry was born in Melbourne but grew up in Brisbane until joining the RAAF where he served for 20 years. After leaving the RAAF he lived in Darwin until retirement then moved back to Brisbane. His retirement hobby was tracing his family tree, and after finding several convict ancestors he started writing about their lives in 2005. The books were originally published in print and have sold out. New information still comes to hand, but rather than reprinting new editions he has released them as ebooks that can be easily updated. The print books sold at cost and the ebooks are free because much of the information was contributed by other family members over the years. If casual readers enjoy the stories, that is payment enough.

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Table of Contents

Prologue

Part_One_Richard Venvill

Part_Two_Joseph Allen

Part_Three_Their Connection

Epilogue

Prologue

Elizabeth Allan looked at the passing countryside without really seeing it. She was very familiar with this road, but she wasn't in any frame of mind to enjoy the scenery on this particular trip. The bus she was riding in would stop at several towns during the 60 mile journey from Melbourne to Ballarat, towns such as Melton, Bacchus Marsh, Ballan and Mount Egerton to name a few. She had passed through all of them many times over the years, but this trip in 1924 would be her last.

All these towns owed their beginnings to the discovery of gold at Buninyong near Ballarat in 1851. At that time, they provided resting places for men heading to the diggings. Men travelled mostly on foot in those early days of Australian settlement, since horses were in short supply, and the cost of buying and maintaining one was beyond the reach of the average working man. In contrast, prospecting for gold cost little more than the price of a pick and shovel, and promised great rewards. The introduction of expensive Miner's Licences took some of the gloss off the venture though, leading to public dissent, and in one case, outright rebellion. Despite the enormous quantity of gold won from mines at Ballarat, Bendigo, Castlemaine and many other places, the sheer numbers of prospectors working the diggings meant that only a very small percentage of those men actually found enough gold to become rich.

This highway was tarred now, but for most of the many trips that Elizabeth had made between Mt Egerton and Melbourne in the last 60 years, it had been not much more than a dirt track. The density of traffic had not increased much over the years, and may even be less now than it was during the gold rush years. Elizabeth's partner Bill Allan was with her on the bus as he had been many times before, but this time it was different. They were going to tell her mother Susan Vurlow, who was still living at Mt Egerton, that Elizabeth had been diagnosed with cancer, and had perhaps a year to live.

The diagnosis had come as a shock to Elizabeth and Bill, since both had thought that his lung congestion would kill him first. Bill had spent most of his adult life working in mines and quarries, and the dust that had accumulated in his lungs was gradually suffocating him. He had left the quarry when his illness became apparent, and he and Elizabeth moved to the Melbourne suburb of Footscray just before the outbreak of World War One.

Elizabeth's younger days had been somewhat clouded by scandal. She had borne several children out of wedlock, and then was married and widowed before finally settling down with Bill. He had been married before too, and had five children, but his wife and one child had died. Elizabeth and Bill then lived together and had five more children. She was now known as Elizabeth Allan, and some of the children she had with Bill were now also using his name, after being registered as illegitimate at birth. Bill and Elizabeth never legally married each other, although for convenience they allowed people to assume they had. Now here they were, both of them with fatal illnesses, Elizabeth with cervical cancer and Bill's congested lungs deteriorating and slowly killing him.

Elizabeth knew she would go first, and had already gone through the phases of denial, anger, and acceptance. She was 62, so she'd had a reasonable turn at life, although her maternal grandfather Richard Venvill had lived to 86. His eldest daughter Susan Vurlow, Elizabeth's mother, was still healthy at the age of 84, despite having given birth to nine children, of whom Elizabeth was the eldest. Elizabeth herself had had 8 children, in addition to looking after Bill's four, all of them grown up now, and she wondered how long she may have lived without this cancer.

After the bus passed through Bacchus Marsh, Elizabeth watched as she always did when travelling on this road, for the tree that marked her birthplace. Her mother had pointed it out to her years ago, and she liked to see that it was still there each time she passed by. The tree hadn't been planted to mark her birth, it just happened to be growing at the place where the bullock wagon stopped, as Susan went into labour on their way to the hospital in 1862. Elizabeth was born in drizzling rain soon after, on a canvas tarpaulin under the wagon.

The tree was still there, much bigger now than the first time she had seen it, and it was comforting to see that something of what she remembered as the good old days remained. There were no bullock wagons now, at least on the main roads. They were still used in the bush to haul logs to sawmills, or in any situation that was too rough for horses. Bullock teams were preferred over horses, because they were much stronger, tougher, required less feed and maintenance, and almost no load was too heavy, nor terrain too rough for a good team. Furthermore, at the end of their working life, they could be sold for meat. Their only disadvantage was that they always travelled at the same slow walk. Cars were becoming more common now, cutting the travel time from Melbourne to Ballarat from a full day by horse and cart, to just a couple of hours.

Before he died, Elizabeth's grandfather Richard Venvill had entrusted her with a secret that he had never told anyone else. It was a shameful story in that Victorian era, but he felt that he had to show her that even when the future looked bleak, it was always possible to succeed. Everyone knew he had been one of the earliest settlers in Victoria in 1837, and people always assumed that he had come directly from England, but that wasn't so. He told her that he had been in some trouble in Gloucestershire in 1830 and was transported to Tasmania as a convict, but was pardoned before he finished his seven year sentence.

Elizabeth didn't feel embarrassed by Richard's past, but she was aware that if this story became general knowledge, it would be a source of rumour and gossip about her family. There was already enough of that about her own misdeeds as a young woman, and so she had never told anyone of it. The prevailing family story, that Richard had come from Gloucestershire to be the Overseer for well-respected Squatter John Wallace, at Ballark near Mt Egerton, would do.

Bill's father Joseph had also been less than a Saint, as Bill had told Elizabeth many years after they started living together. Joseph Allen was known as one of the men who discovered gold at Blackwood just north of Mt Egerton, but there was much more to his story too. No one knew he had been a convict, and few people remembered that, years later, he was arrested for threatening to kill his wife. When Joseph died, the community knew him as an upstanding pioneer of the Blackwood district. Now, only a few of his children knew his real history. Bill was one of them.

No, there were too many black sheep in this family, and Elizabeth intended to have as many die with her as possible. There was no need to embarrass her family by telling anyone. Her children, step children and grandchildren wouldn't want to know that they were descended from such socially unacceptable people.

Part One - Richard Venvill

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Chapter 1

It was mid-afternoon on Saturday the 27th of November 1830 as the mob of around 60 men, armed with pitchforks, shovels and sledgehammers crowded around the front of the barn. Facing the mob were twelve other men, also armed with shovels and pitchforks. They were hopelessly outnumbered, but were determined to defend the barn against this attack.

'Open that barn Mister Preator, we don't want to damage it. We only want to be rid of those machines that keep us in poverty.' The Captain of the mob shouted to the owner of this farm.

'Yes,' called another man, 'we don't want to hurt you but we aren't leaving until those machines are destroyed.'

James Preator had known this was going to happen one day. He had hoped the authorities would quell the uprising before it spread to Gloucestershire, but as more men joined the rampaging mobs it was clear that his turn would come. He actually understood and sympathised with these men, but there was nothing he could do to ease their hardship and still run his farm.

The seeds of this uprising were sown a generation before this, and the problem had festered until 1830, when yet another in a succession of poor harvests provided the final straw. Farm labourers were at the very bottom of the employment scale, earning only about 1 shilling and 6 pence a day, and they didn't work every day during the year. Their meagre incomes were affected by variations in harvests as weather affected farm yields.

For many generations, farm owners had provided housing for their labourers, and even their families at times, on the farm properties, and the cost of this accommodation was factored into their wages. The system had worked satisfactorily until the last years of the 18th century, when changes occurred that disadvantaged the labourers.

Farmers were subject to several taxes, but two were significant in setting the stage for discontent. One was the Poor Tax, paid by all landowners based on their property valuation, levied to support unemployed and homeless people in their parish. The other was a 'tithe' paid to the parish church providing the income for the Rector or Curate. When tithing started in around 800AD, it was intended to be one tenth of the produce of a farm, and tithe barns were built to store the produce until it was required by the Church. That system proved unwieldy, due to the physical difficulty of clergymen collecting and selling the produce. Over time, the tithe began to be paid in cash at an agreed rate. That rate didn't fluctuate accurately in line with good and bad harvests, so farmers were often paying in cash, the equivalent of much more than ten percent of the year's crop production. In bad years, this put pressure on their ability to pay their labourers, and they looked for any cost savings they could find.

The farmers reasoned that if the clergy reduced their tithes, labourers could be employed at a reasonable wage, thus reducing the need for handouts from the Church. However, asking the clergy to reduce their tithe was met with flat refusal, even though it was clear to everyone that the Church was accumulating great wealth. They did distribute some of that wealth to the poor and unemployed, and in doing so, maintained considerable power and influence over their communities. The clergy were not about to give up their privileged position, despite the hardships suffered by their parishioners.

One of the first savings that farmers made was simply not offering the traditional housing and conditions to new employees. From about 1790, they started progressively removing the housing benefit and labourers had to find and pay for their own accommodation in nearby villages. It was a cause of discontent among the labourers because there was no commensurate increase in wages to help pay for this extra living cost. As all the older workers either died off or left for some reason, their employment conditions disappeared with them. So, labouring families found that as their sons grew old enough to work, they would only be employed under lesser conditions than their fathers had been given, and their living costs were higher. Thus, even employed men dropped below the poverty line, and became dependent on the parish for survival.

Families rarely moved more than a few miles from their birth place in their lifetime, due to the 'Law of Settlement Act' of 1602. It allowed a parish to reject new arrivals unless they were able to work, and to produce proof that their home parish would take them back, and therefore provide for them if they became destitute. That effectively stopped the poorest men looking for work outside their own parish. High unemployment also meant that new people entering a parish put further pressure on the people already working there, and they were often discouraged from staying by the parishioners themselves.

The changes really started to bite in 1795 when a misguided decision by a meeting of Berkshire Magistrates, attempting to assist the labourers, set the scene for increasing unrest. They decided that, rather than fixing wages to the price of bread as was generally accepted as fair, they simply chose to supplement low wages from parish funds. The effect of the decision was the opposite of what was intended. Farmers could now reduce their wage payments even further and have the parish clergy, to whom they were already contributing anyway, make up the difference. The other effect was that labourers would be paid a minimum wage by the parish even if they didn't work at all. The distinction between paupers and the working poor disappeared. The decision was never made a law, but was adopted widely in England.

The problems of low wages and high unemployment were compounded in 1815 when soldiers returning from the Napoleonic war flooded the labour market, putting more downward pressure on wages. Concurrently, throughout England, the general population was increasing, and new steam-powered labour-saving machinery was being introduced, though it was not yet having much effect in rural areas.

Steam ploughing had been tried, by setting up an engine on the edge of a field and dragging a multi-shared plough across it by long cable. It worked, but the irregular shape of fields, the difficulty of frequently moving the engine, and its high capital cost made the system cumbersome and expensive, and was unattractive to farm owners.

The farming industry proved not to be immune from mechanisation though, and soon, new machines appeared that would have a devastating effect on farm labour. One in particular was the horse driven threshing machine. Traditionally, threshing was done in a box-like structure, rocked by several men as another two loaded the grain stalks into the top. The grains were shaken loose and were collected as they fell out of the bottom. The new machine used a system of gears and shafts to drive a rotating arm inside the box that knocked the grains off the stalks much quicker than the manual method. It was powered by a horse tethered to a large wheel, usually outside the barn. The horse simply walked in a circle rotating the wheel, which in turn drove gears and a long shaft that connected them to the box inside the barn. The horse worked long hours for nothing but feed, and only the men loading the stalks into the machine and collecting the grain from the bottom were needed to operate the whole process. This had the effect of reducing workers from six to two, and with unemployment rising, those two had to work for less money.

New jobs were being created for the manufacture of steam engines and related machinery, but they were skilled occupations beyond the reach of traditional labourers, and discontent grew in rural areas. The weather didn't help either. In 1827 and 1828, harvests were down due to poor weather, and that was followed by the worst winter on record in 1829/30. The combination of low wages, poor harvests, high food prices, and cold weather led to the simmering discontent among farm workers exploding in 1830.

The discontent was universal, but the ensuing riots were predominantly confined to southern English counties where farm labourers were concentrated more densely, and could more easily form mobs to create trouble. The trouble would last only a short time though, as the Government, at first slow to see the problem developing, eventually took harsh action to bring it under control. Nevertheless, those few months changed the lives of hundreds of men, and probably an equal number of women who were themselves either directly involved, or whose men-folk never returned to their former role as the family breadwinner.

In March of 1830, some landowners in Kent had received letters threatening consequences unless they increased farm labourers' wages. They were asking for a minimum of 2 shillings and 3 pence per day, a roughly 50% increase. The letters were typically short and to the point, simply saying that unless the farmers broke up their own machines, the workers would do it for them. The farmers took no notice of the letters, and soon there were several reports of farm equipment and haystacks being burned. During the following months, the trouble spread as more letters were sent to landowners, signed by a Captain Swing. This turned out to be a name invented to unite the workers across the country, and was probably derived from the swinging arm on the most hated threshing machine. The first threshing machine had been destroyed in Kent in August.

Soon, the unrest gathered momentum as more arson attacks were reported, and the workers' anger wasn't restricted solely to farm equipment. In Hampshire, workhouses