Joseph Broadbury, letter writer, butcher and thief

Joseph was born around 1813 in Nottinghamshire, England, to John Broadbury, a boatman, of North Collingham.1 His mother’s name is unknown at this time. Joseph was 18 when he and a friend, Vessey Ferniough, 17, were tried and convicted of stealing two sheep from Thomas Goodman at the Nottingham Summer Assizes in July 1831.2 Their sentence was death, subsequently commuted to 14 years transportation. The Home Office archives available on FindMyPast contain several letters and petitions on behalf of the young men, attesting to their respectable families, their previous good character, and their youth, with one petition even sent by the farmer whose sheep they stole.3 The petitioners asked that they be allowed to serve their sentences in England since those transported rarely returned to their country of birth after their sentence was complete. However, they were unsuccessful.

Joseph and Vessey left England on the Clyde along with 198 other male convicts in April 1832.4 The ship surgeon’s journal survives, but Joseph and Vessey don’t feature, and the journey was without incident, according to surgeon Morgan Price.5 Joseph’s convict indent describes him as 5 feet 8 inches with ruddy complexion, red hair and hazel eyes. Interestingly, it also records several tattoos on his arms, which might seem to contradict his professed respectability and youth and good character, but it was quite common for convicts to get tattoos to remember family members.6 Upon arrival in Port Jackson in August 1832, Joseph was assigned to William Cox of Hobartville, an army officer and landholder, son of William Cox of Clarendon, a soldier, explorer and landholder who famously built a road over the Blue Mountains in 1814, opening up new land for settlement and exploitation.7

Joseph appears to have kept in contact with his family in Nottingham; a letter sent from him to his parents in 1836 is even archived in the Home Office records available on FindMyPast. He says he is waiting on a letter from Vessey and has not met anyone he knows from the old country in the district in which he is living, “400 miles up Cuntery from Sidney [sic].”8 It appears he is still looking to ensuring his future as he has asked William Cox for a character reference.

He writes that he received a fiddle they had sent him but the set of butcher’s knives they had given him he had been forced to sell to sailors on the Clyde, convicts not being allowed to keep knives.9 The end of the letter, addressed to dear friends, is in a much messier hand and he talks of going further north than any “Wight man” to build a cattle station, and having to carry guns to fire upon the “Blacks” if they are “Wicked”.10 This is quite revealing of the general attitudes of the time towards Indigenous Australians resisting colonisation, and William Cox senior is known to have been involved in punitive expeditions in the early days of the colony.11 Joseph signs off, poignantly, “God be with you mother and father for I cannot.”

In the 1837 convict muster, Joseph was recorded at Invermein (later renamed Scone) still with William Cox.12 In March 1839 he received his Ticket of Leave. Usually, they entitled the holder to seek paid employment but restricted them to a particular district. Joseph’s was a little different, entitling him to “be employed in the service of William Cox Esq beyond the boundaries for three months.”13 It seemed Cox needed Joseph’s labour outside of the boundaries of Invermein and was connected enough to arrange it.

Sometime in 1840, Joseph was apparently held up by the ‘Jew Boy Gang’, a gang of convict bushrangers, headed by Edward Davis aka George Wilkinson aka Teddy the Jew Boy, who had arrived on the Camden in 1833, and including John Marshall, who had arrived on the Clyde in 1832, the same ship as Joseph and Vessey.14 I say ‘apparently’ because I have only one source, a newspaper article written in 1922. According to the article, they stole everything of value Joseph had, including his horse, plus some documents belonging to William Cox, and he joined the pursuit party for the gang led by Police Magistrate Denny Day. The gang were captured and tried and executed in Sydney. The story contains several inaccuracies, and I have not found Joseph’s name in any other accounts of the pursuit and arrest of the gang, so I am unsure how reliable it is.15 The article also claims he arrived “under engagement as overseer for Captain William Cox” in 1834, earning a “princely salary of 50 [pounds] a year, with quarters and keep” and that Joseph, although “urged by his people to return home, married, and held country in Scone and Muswellbrook districts for many years, and after an honourable career at the age of 80 breathed his last,” an obvious whitewashing of his convict origins.16

In July 1843 Joseph received permission to marry Mary Bargin, (sister of Julia Bargin who married machine breaker Joseph Baker) who had arrived free on the ship Eleanor in 1841.17 However, the marriage is registered in 1842, so perhaps he sought permission after the fact.18 Their first daughter Sarah was born in 1844, and then in October 1845 Joseph was granted his freedom.19 He was now free to return to England, but he had a family, and a life in the colony, so he stayed. Joseph and Mary had five children in all and two of their daughters (Mary Jane and Julia Agnes) married two sons (Henry and Thomas Edward) of William Worrad aka Henry Whorrod junior and Ellen Edwards, my 3x great grandparents.20