People Australia

Jane Jones, servant and convict, was born in about 1795, the daughter of William Jones, a London glassmaker.[1] In the early hours of the morning of 16 May 1812, she unlawfully entered a Manchester Public House.[2] Caught in the possession of food, eating utensils, and money, Jones and a female accomplice were immediately arrested.[3] She was tried at the Old Bailey on 1 July, where she was ‘[i]ndicted for burglarously breaking and entering’ and her defence rested on the plea: ‘we were desperate’.[4] Her stolen cache, valued at around four hundred British pounds, comprised a ‘chicken, four loaves of bread, five eggs, a saucepan, butter, cheese, two spoons, forks, knives, a tinder box and coins’.[5]With no sympathy from publican owner Caperton, who testified that the chicken was ‘still warm’ (presumably from a recent kill), the First Middlesex Jury passed a guilty verdict, sentencing both girls to death.[6] Youth and good character were on their side, and the sentence was converted to transportation for life.[7]    

After being incarcerated at Bridewell Middlesex Gaol, Jones was among forty female convicts who boarded the Emu at Portsmouth on 12 November 1812, bound for the colony of New South Wales.[8] Nearing the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa, the Emu was captured by an American vessel, the Holkar.[9] Its convict passengers were abandoned without provisions on Saint Vincent Island in the Atlantic Ocean.[10] An 1820s map of the area featuring a Catholic church near the harbour suggests local nuns probably ‘took them in’.[11] Word of the convicts’ plight eventually reached England, and seven months later a British rescue ship, Isabella, landed Jones at Portsmouth on 12 October 1813.[12] According to Elizabeth Hook, the convicts were in such ‘a state of nakedness’ that dock entry was initially refused.[13]

After another four months languishing in Portsmouth harbour, Jones boarded the Broxbournebury, bound for New South Wales on 22 February 1814.[14] Accompanying her on the voyage were free settlers, Sir John Jamison, his steward-clerk John Stilwell, and his friend Jeffery Bent.^[15] Jamison, the son of Sirius First Fleet surgeon’s mate, Thomas Jamison, was journeying to the colony to assume the management of his father’s extensive agricultural and business interests.^[16] Bent’s surviving sea voyage journal describes Jamison as a man of means, wealth, and influence, yet possessing a compassionate disposition towards the female convicts. He clothed them, provided additional water, and encouraged religious service attendance, land stays, and ship deck dancing for exercise.^[17] With female convicts ‘unbound and unshackled’, as Kay Daniels notes, Bent wrote of many instances of convicts dancing to the ‘beat of the drum and fife’ on the night time Broxbournebury deck, all under the close gaze of Stilwell and Jamison.^[18]

After twenty months at sea, on arriving in the colony Jones was assigned to Jamison and subsequently as a housekeeper to her future husband, Stilwell.[19] Together, Jones and Stilwell managed Jamison’s Sydney Westmoreland Arms Hotel.[20] She gave birth to two children before Governor Lachlan Macquarie granted them permission to marry in 1819, despite her still being a convict.[21] After one year spent working for wages as a ticket-of-leave holder, she became one of only two Broxbournebury convicts to be granted an absolute pardon.[22] She had three more children with Stilwell before marrying convict forger John Webster, one of two wood carvers employed to construct Macquarie’s chairs.[23]With him she had six children, adding to her growing family.[24] Having lived a long life, she died in Goulburn, New South Wales, on 24 April 1868.[25]

[1]  Jane Jones, 1812, ‘Proceedings of the Old Bailey’, Trial Account Old Bailey Proceedings Online, Harvard University from the microfilm, Harvard, USA, t18120701-58, Version 9.0, Autumn 2023, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t18120701-58?text=%22jane%20jones%22, accessed 10 May 2024; Elizabeth Hook, Journey to a New Life: The Story of the ships Emu in 1812 and Broxbournebury in 1814, Including Crew, Female Convicts and Free Passengers on Board (Minto: E. Hook, 2000), 80.

[2]  Jones, ‘Proceedings of the Old Bailey’.

[3]  Ibid.

[4]  Jane Jones, New South Wales, Australia, Settler and Convict Lists 1787-1834, New South Wales, Female Convicts, Ancestry.com, accessed 8 May 2024; Jones, ‘Proceedings of the Old Bailey’.

[5]  ‘London’, Hampshire Chronicle, 25 May 1812, 132.

[6]  Jones, ‘Proceedings of the Old Bailey’.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Jane Jones, 1795-1868, Convict Records, Broxbournebury Voyage-Convicts, convictrecords.com.au/ships/broxbournebury/voyages/50?convicts=2, accessed 13 May 2024; Hook, Journey to a New Life, 6.

[9] Female Convicts Research Centre, Broxbournebury, Emu 1814, https://femaleconvicts.org.au/index.php/convict-ships/convict-ship-records, accessed 13 May 2024.

[10] ‘Ship’s List Emu (1)’, Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie Archive Project, https://www.mq.edu.au/macquarie-archive/lema/maritime/ships-list/e.html, accessed 19 May 2024.

[11]  Hook, Journey to a New Life, 7.

[12]  Ibid., 8.

[13] Ibid., 7.

[14] Transportation Record of Jane Jones Series HO11, Convict Transportation Registers 1779-1871, National Library of Australia, Image 116 & 117, http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1280744169, accessed 3 May 2024.

[15] Jeffery Hart Bent, diary entries for 19 February 1814, p. 1, and 28 July 1814, p. 206, in Journal of Voyage Performed onboard the Ship Broxbournebury, Captain Thomas Pitcher from England to New South Wales, Papers of Ellis Bent and Jeffery Hart Bent, National Library of Australia, MS195.

[16] James G. Lergessner, Great Southern Land: Origins of the Early New South Wales Colony (Brisbane: Schuurs Publications, 2009) 284; C. P. Dolan [in the Herald], ‘Sir John Jamison A Colonial Personality’, Scone Advocate, 11 January 1938, 4.

[17] Bent, diary entry for 4 March 1814, pp. 11-12; Bent, diary entry for 4 June 1814, p. 142; Heather Blasdale- Clarke, ‘The History of Music and Dance in Australia 1770-1900, Dancing on Convict Ships’, @AusDanceHistory blog, 30 April 2021, https://www.historicaldance.au/dancing-on-convict-ships/, accessed 30 May 2024.

[18] Kay Daniels, Convict Women (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1998), 102; Bent, diary entry for 1 April 1814, p. 61; Bent, diary entry for 2 April, p. 63; Bent, diary entry for 6 April, p. 69; Bent, diary entry for 16 April, p. 81.

[19]  New South Wales, Australia, Convict Records 1810–1891 for Jane Jones Assignment and Employment of Convicts, Ancestry.com, accessed 2 May 2024; ‘Ship News’, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 30 July 1814, 2.

[20] ‘Notice to the Public’, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 11 March 1820, 1; Hook, Journey to a New Life, 80.

[21] Colonial Secretary Index 1788-1825, ‘Jones, Jane per Broxbournebury, 1814, Permission to Marry John Stilwell 5 April 1819, Reel, 60064/3500, p 67, Government of New South Wales, State Records of New South Wales, https://colsec.records.nsw.gov.au/ij/F29c_jo-ju-10.htm, accessed 8 May 2024; Australian Royalty: Genealogy of the Colony of NSW, https://australianroyalty.net.au/tree/purnellmccord.ged/individual/I118/John-Stilwell, accessed 18 May 2024.

[22]  New South Wales and Tasmania Australia Convict Musters 1806–1849, General Musters A–L, Jane Jones, Ancestry.com; New South Wales, Australia, Settler and Convicts Lists 1787–1834, [1816, 1818, 1820, 1821], Ticket of Leave, Ancestry.com; Australia Convict Records Index, 1787–1867, State Library of Queensland, South Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, https://convictrecords.com.au, accessed 6 May 2024; Deborah Oxley, Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 183.

[23] Hook, Journey to a New Life, 80; Xena Barlow Inspired Interiors, ‘Colonial Period Governor Macquarie’s Gothic Revival Chair History’, n.d., http://xenabarlow.com/interiors/iconic-design/colonial-period-governor-macquaries-gothic-revival-chair/, accessed 11 May 2024.

[24] Hook, Journey to a New Life, 80.

[25]  Ibid., 81.