People Australia

Thomas Napier with his wife Catherine Napier née McKellar and children, n.d. [digitally enhanced]

Supplied by Tania Flowers

Thomas Napier, convict and printer’s boy, was born about 1818, likely near Pontefract in West Yorkshire, England. In July 1831 he stole vegetables from the garden of John Atkinson at Little Woodhouse, West Yorkshire.[1] As punishment, he was committed to the House of Correction at Wakefield for two months.[2] That September he was charged with stealing two ropes, the property of Mr Firth of Heckmondwike.[3] Six months later, in April 1832 he was charged with stealing a linen sheet, the property of Mr James Laycock, cloth-dresser, at Sheepscar Mill.[4] During the Leeds Borough Sessions of 9 April, he was sentenced to transportation for seven years.[5] He was held at York Castle Prison before being moved on board the Euryalus at Chatham on 24 April.[6]

From the Euryalus, Napier was scheduled to board the Surrey (3), bound for Van Diemen’s Land on 18 November 1832.[7] As was the case for Napier and many other young boys, the sentence of transportation far exceeded the severity of the offence.[8]  After initial delays, the ship departed the Downs on 4 December 1832 with 204 male convicts on board, as well as forty guards from the 17th, 21st, 41st, and 63rd Regiments, and their wives and children.[9] The master was Charles Kemp and David Wyse was the surgeon.[10] The ship arrived in Hobart on 7 April 1833 after 124 days at sea.[11] Transportation was notoriously difficult, marred by disease and sickness.[12]

After 1816 all convicts who disembarked in Australia were interrogated and described upon arrival.[13] Napier was four feet nine inches (145 centimetres) tall, with a fresh complexion, brown hair, eyes and eyebrows, and a small chin and mouth.[14] His occupation is listed as ‘Printers Boy’.[15] In this role, he would have assisted a printer to operate a press in the production of printed material and documents.[16]

In the colony, Napier was assigned to various public work projects and was frequently written up for neglect of duty, disobedience of orders, insubordination, insolence, and absenting himself without leave.[17] Punishment for these offences ranged from lashings and solitary confinement to hard labour in chains.[18] After serving his seven years, Thomas was granted a certificate of freedom in 1839.[19]

However, on 24 January 1846 Napier was brought before the Supreme Court of Tasmania, charged with the theft of seven sheep, the property of Thomas Lloyd Gellibrand.[20] Gellibrand was a local magistrate and the eldest son of Joseph Gellibrand, the first Attorney-General of Van Diemen’s Land.[21] As punishment, Thomas was sentenced for life and transported to Norfolk Island for four years, arriving there on 12 May 1846.[22] Despite his usual disobedience and unruliness, he was recommended for meritorious conduct for helping extinguish a fire.[23] After serving four years on Norfolk, he returned to Hobart on 14 January 1851. On 20 May 1851 he was reported as having absconded.[24] It is the last recorded information in his convict record.

Anne Clowes is the third-great-granddaughter of Thomas Napier.

 References

[1] ‘Caution to Garden Robbers’, Leeds Intelligencer and Yorkshire General Advertiser, 28 July 1831, 3.

[2] Ibid.

[3] ‘Local Intelligence, Court-House’, Leeds Intelligencer and Yorkshire General Advertiser, 29 September 1831, 3.

[4] ‘Committals’, Leeds Intelligencer and Yorkshire General Advertiser, 5 April 1832, 3.

[5] ‘Leeds Borough Sessions’, Leeds Mercury, 14 April 1832, 3.

[6] ‘Convicts’, Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald, 28 April 1832, 2.

[7] Entry for Thomas Napier, age 14, received 24 April 1832, UK Prison Hulk Registers and Letter Books, Home Office, Class H09, Piece 2, 1802-1849, The National Archives, Kew, via Ancestry.com.

[8] Thomas E. Jordon, ‘Transported to Van Diemen’s Land: The Boys of the Frances Charlotte (1832) and Lord Goderich (1841)’, Child Development 56, no. 4 (1985): 1094.

[9] Report on the Arrival at the Port of Hobart Town of the Ship Surrey 7 April 1833, General Correspondence: Colonial Secretary’s Office, CSO1/1/649, File Number 14579, Image 2, Page 200, Tasmanian State Archives.

[10] Charles Bateson, The Convict Ships 1787-1868, second ed. (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, 1985), 362.

[11] Thomas Napier, Surrey (3), Convict Conduct Record (1), CON31/1/33, p. 38, Tasmanian State Archives, via Libraries Tasmania, 1823-1833, https://libraries.tas.gov.au/Digital/CON31-1-33/CON31-1-33, p. 42; Bateson, The Convict Ships, 362.

[12] Jordon, ‘Transported to Van Diemen’s Land’, 1093.

[13] Terence Donald, Kris Inwood  and Hamish Maxwell-Stuart, ‘Adolescent growth and convict transportation to nineteenth-century Australia’, The History of the Family 28, no. 2 (2023): 257.

[14] Thomas Napier, Description Lists of Convicts arriving in VDL as per Surrey (3,) 7 April 1833, CON18-1-20, Image 230, Tasmanian State Archives.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Jane Hewitt and Paul Jack Hewitt, Dictionary of Occupations (Family Researcher, 2009) [eBook].

[17] Thomas Napier, Convict Conduct Record (1).

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Thomas Napier, Surrey (3), Convict Conduct Record (2), Principal Superintendent of Convicts: Chronological record book of Convicts still on strength at the introduction of the probation system and arriving in VDL 1 Feb 1833–9 May 1834, CPN34-1-4, Image 723, https://libraries.tas.gov.au/Digital/CON34-1-4/CON34-1-4P723, Tasmanian State Archives; Thomas Napier, Court Documents: Trial date 24 January 1846, NAME_INDEXES: 1508398, SC32-1-5, Image 199, https://libraries.tas.gov.au/Digital/SC32-1-5/SC32-1-5p215jpg, Tasmanian State Archives.

[21] ‘Joseph Gellibrand’, Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia, 5 March 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Gellibrand, accessed 17 May 2024.

[22] Thomas Napier, Convict Conduct Record (2).

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.