Peekle

The shocking incident that rocked Sydney Cove colony eleven years after the First Fleet landing. This is a non-fiction story about my gggg-grandparents, Thomas and Elizabeth Jones. It is the result of extensive research — fuelled by a long-standing, familial cover-up that I’d doubted from the get-go.

All ‘scenes’ in this story are anchored in truth. Descriptions of colony life were gathered from many sources: court documents; correspondence, logs, and reports between colony officials and their masters in England; and a surprisingly full account taken by a Methodist minister following the arrests, charges, and jailing of the condemned.

When I was a young, I took everything at face value. Believed everyone and everything. Towards the end of high school, I changed. Or rather developed skills to spot a crock, and interrogate a lie.

People with these skills are fluent in non-verbal clues – the important subtext often missed by others. Anyone showing a flicker of change in demeanour, behaviour, cadence and/or tone, then out flew a Big Daddy red flag.

The culprits.

Great aunts, aunts and old cousins would forget you’re in the room once the pitch rose. The Cloak of Invisibility fell faster if you did the tea-and-coffee thing, flicked a dishcloth about, and said nothing. In seconds, you’d slide into the Laminex.

When the full crush gathered at Nana’s, pulling chairs and pop-up tables into the kitchen/dining, all talked of the past – mainly to interject and correct.

If a primary-school project on convict ancestors was mentioned, the great gaggle would freeze, or marshal crumbs, and torture napkins. Only cups hitting saucers had something to say: “Get ready for a dodgy convict yarn.”

I’d missed the segue to the First Fleet, but not the lull. I turned away from the kettle, and stole a peek. Bother. I’d been ‘seen’.

Someone was speaking, so as the big, bossy one interjected, out trotted the old, rote-learned lines, I hoped she’d betray a thread I could worry.

“They were landlords,” she said to me, though I’d not spoken.

“They’re your great-great-great-great grandparents, and they were in court as witnesses. They didn’t see anything, of course, but their boarder was up for murder, you see,” she said. “They testified to his character, that’s all it was. Anyone for …”

Then why bring it up?

“… more tea? More cake?”

Moreover, one chimed, “It was all a very long time ago.” And there it was, the end of the matter. While I stowed it all in my memory bank under; “Things I Think Are Lies”, the oldies had moved on to The War Years.

But the reddest flag was this: Who talks about character witnesses from the 18th century in the 20th century? If this was a coverup, it had its roots in Sydney Cove.

Hmm …

I grappled with the concept of gggg-grandparents eking out a living in a pint-sized Sydney Town, into which ships purged cargoes of convicts, supplies, and sickness. They were my great-grandmother’s grandparents, and she’d died just seven years before I was born.

The centuries-old chasm was becoming a jumpable gap. I was determined to crack this multi-generational crock!

As records found their way to heritage sites, so did I; putting names to faces to places. No obvious skeletons lay among the bare bones of what was then available. However, since naming my gggg-grandparents, everything opened up! I learned that they’d died young – she 29, and he, 34 – and on the same day. I steeled for a tragedy. Had to be. A bunch of streets in Pyrmont and Ultimo – even a bay – were named for them.

Transportation.

A peacock-blue silk dress, matching hat and gloves triggered the downfall of Elizabeth Maryann Stratton Leatherby.

Eighteen years old and of no listed occupation, she was sentenced to 14 years, commuted to seven, for swiping the get-up from a stately home in Exeter, Devon.

It was nearly New Year 1788. Lunch guests had just arrived at the posh house – the last lot moving through and failing to properly close door. Elizabeth, loitering out the front, was surprised the opportunity came so early in her quest and, stealing up the stoop, opened the door just enough to poke her head through.

Following the hubbub, she peered through the foyer to the right of the staircase and down into the hall where servants buzzed in and out of a dining room.

She slipped inside and raced up the stairs. At the landing, she found the lady’s dressing room and what she was after.

Elizabeth had trailed the elegant lady, who’d just collected the ensemble, only to judge if they shared a similar stature and build, which she had, so she would follow her home.

The thief was making off with the haul when she was glimpsed bumbling through the door. The alarm raised, the head of the house chased the felon down the street, and manhandled her, still clutching her loot, into the police station.

Awaiting transportation to Sydney Cove’s penal colony, she was gaoled ahead of the boarding the Second Fleet’s Neptune with a thousand-odd others, arriving early 1790.

First Fleeter.

In 1785, Thomas Jones, 23, tailor, petty thief and sometime-prisoner, copped 14 years, commuted to seven, to be gaoled ahead of transportation to Sydney Cove for the five-fingered purchase of a solid silver tankard from a posh house in Warwick, Bristol.

Travelling cattle class, after eight months aboard the First Fleet’s Alexander, he and fifteen hundred or so passengers all told, came up-close with what would rapidly become the cheapest seats, half a world away.

Elizabeth and Thomas tied the knot in 1791 while prisoners, which needed colony chaplain Rev. Richard Johnson’s consent – then a nod from NSW governor, Arthur Phillip. Elizabeth signed the register “with her mark”, an X. They had two children: Thomas, born 1790, and Mary, in 1792. And Thomas’s daughter – a half-sister, Ann Jones, named for his mother – was born in 1794, but did not reside with the family.

Once free settlers began arriving in coming years, stricter control of the convicts would become a priority. But as the bulk of the colony was there at His Majesty’s Pleasure, no uniform was worn, nor dormitory fenced, nor was there segregation.

Besides, there was no one around worthy of protection from the criminal element, and those who qualified lived well apart. A police presence and a gaol became fixtures once the first lot of convicts began their freedom and free settlers started appearing, intent on a fresh start.

While prisoners, the men and women were exploited by, well, nearly everyone who had the slightest authority. Building; land-clearing; clay-digging and refining; road-grading, filling in toilet pits; laundry and mending of army uniforms as well as the clothes of convicts; and all unsavoury jobs were thrown – absolutely free of charge – to the slave labourers. Thomas was probably spared the worst, given his tailoring skills.

Twice pregnant, Elizabeth’s confinements were spent in the laundry. At night, she slept in a nursery tent where the children were born, weaned then taken away – as orphans – until their mother’s sentence was over and she’d proven able to care for them. Women, whose babies were born outside marriage, had six months added to their sentence for having the audacity to flaunt low morals.

After the First Fleet had docked and had been purged of the emaciated, scurvy-ridden convicts – many bringing with them more disease and suffering – the first years were brutal. The colony suffered famine after the second lot of crops had failed. The Indian corn given a hand after disgruntled Aborigines, incensed that some of their number had been shot, had set it alight. All the while, on half-rations and exhausted, the wanton exploitation of the prisoners persisted at pace. This included clearing, ploughing and sowing grain on private farms at the more fertile Parramatta.

Convicts freed on tickets-of-leave were bonded to remain in the colony to work, farm and generally kickstart the town. As a sweetener, they were given rudimentary houses – a few rooms in a wattle-and-daub affair – opposite the brickfields. The windows had no glass – as the fleet brought only enough for the governor’s mansion – so shutters made of twigs laced into form were used. The door was no better – just a bigger shutter made from stronger, longer branches. Both were hinged using reeds or rope.

Thomas Jones had befriended the sawyer, who had provided him with wooden plank offcuts from which he made somewhat superior shutters and doors throughout. The roof was thatched, using none of the materials employed at home – with unsurprising results.

After long laughing about local Aboriginal dwellings with their roofs of bark stripped from trees, they relented, and quickly found the material could take a nail and was waterproof and malleable, and borrowed more and more ideas from those who clearly knew better.

Jones owned 55 acres at Cockle Bay, Darling Harbour.

In 1794, Jones was granted his ticket and a year later, a house in the soon-to-be suburb of Brickfields at the Port Jackson end of George Street. And – as a married man, though his wife remained a convict at the camp until 1795 – he was entitled to 55 acres on Cockle Bay’s western shore, in what is now known as Darling Harbour precinct.

But the optimistically named “Jones’s Farm” – like the rest of the cove – was sandy and unfit for farming. He sold up, received a pittance, and joined the NSW Corps. His land was sold to a Mr Obadiah Ilkin who very quickly passed it like a hot potato to Captain John Macarthur – for £10 of rum.

MacArthur, who’d had great success in Parramatta with the land and cattle granted to him, becoming a tremendous food source of beef, fruits and vegetables. He’d bought up several properties in the area, before setting his sights on Sydney Cove where land was available cheaply.

Cattle fed on wild grasses on the partially cleared land, providing much-needed fertiliser to be tilled into the earth. With the balance of the land cleared, he moved the cattle to the new paddock, and ploughed the old. The resultant, plentiful crops meant – along with beef – the colony now had its own food supply; no longer fully reliant on the much-lauded Parramatta. History would record him as the colony’s and, indeed, NSW’s ‘Father of Agriculture’.

Renamed Pyrmont Estate, on “Jones’s Farm” he shared borders with the colony’s surgeon, Dr John Harris, who lived surrounded by several of his properties in a cottage near the hubbub of the colony’s brickfields.

At the camp, hope and expectation of a regular income were dashed. The soldiers’ proper wages had, for some time, failed to reach the lower ranks. Sterling was pilfered by officers, who tossed pennies and promissory notes to the troops. When pennies were pinched, vouchers for sugar, rum and flour were supposed to suffice. The ruse had infected the Corps’ top tiers, so kicking up a fuss was dangerously futile.

The ingrained practice established two economies – one robust with all they needed and wanted, and the other reduced to bartering among themselves, trying to sell goods everyone already had, or forced to employ a light-fingered approach to solving their woes – or sometimes a more heavy-handed option.

The first ‘unionist’.

It beggared belief that the top echelons of the Corps and government were unaware of the cruel, illegal practice. This was put right during the governorship of William Bligh (1806-1808) through the persistent advocacy of George Bond, a former naval ensign known (and once arrested) for acting on his disgust of injustice, fortitude and determination.

Bond, acting like a union leader for the ignored and deprived men, sought to do more than hear a simple, few-word charge – such as “stole stores” – crimes for which the offenders were increasingly led to the gallows.

It was the ‘why’ of it all that was missing, and no one should have been satisfied without it. He examined the root cause and traced it through to some terrible crimes. In Bond’s later, self-published submission – distributed among those top echelons who had, for years, ignored the issue –m he recorded the truth of the scam and its devastating, ripple effect on desperate, debt-ridden soldiers and their dependants.

Private Jones, after working all day, did not wish to spend his free time running around trying to sell items, so he left it to others to flog the dry goods. He took his wages in rum. Apart from letting a room, the Joneses ran a quasi-pub at their home, favoured by sawyers, tailors, petty traders, brick workers, woodworkers, soldiers from the Corp – and those with wives or someone else’s – brought them for a night out. And police in the person of Constable Edward Collins, a most regular customer.

Reverend Doctor Samuel Clode.

Surgeon – Rev. Samuel Clode – a frequent visitor at the house, was among missionaries who’d fled Tahiti after wearing out their welcome in 1798. The natives – a friendly lot to start – didn’t take to being civilised; introduced to manners; and of course, the Good Word.

Non-denominational Christian ministers, they became known as The Duff Missionaries – named so after the ferry-sized ship from which they had fatefully disembarked into a nightmare in Tahiti. Their main mission was always to embed the Risen Lord in hearts and minds, quite the wide-reaching, lofty – and presumptuous – goal. The natives had made plain their murderous intentions.

They landed at Sydney Cove on the trader, Nautilus, early 1798. The ship had happened upon the island while the perilous position of the pastors was escalating – the ship quickly scooped up those desperate to escape. With the old stalwarts among them foolishly refusing to leave, Rev. Clode and seventeen others didn’t squeal any pleas, but smartly boarded the ship. Forty-four days later, they fell headlong into another godless hell hole.

Clode became a “dear friend” of the colony surgeon, Dr John Harris, after he’d nursed the man through a nasty, prolonged illness. Almost back on his feet, Harris was anxious to see his friend before he sailed, so tomorrow had been booked for lunch, Wednesday 3 July. The kindly man was good company – knowledgeable, educated, and generous to a fault with his time, money and medical expertise.

Samuel Clode was also a townsman of Thomas and, once reacquainted, a steady friend. Clode never left the Joneses cash-strapped – though not a wealthy man – nor without enough staples, nor suffering sickness. Kind, though not stupid nor naïve, Clode made contemporaneous entries in a notebook, leaving room for a running total – and Tommy’s initials.

The unspeakable horror.

It was Tuesday, 2 July 1799, when the reverend visited, with his little loan notebook wedged in his belt.

He tapped his cane against the flimsy window frame. Tommy looked up from the small room beyond. Opening the door, he let out a wave of laughter and profanities on a sea of smoke.

“We have twenty of the buggers here tonight,” Tommy said, as he ushered Clode into the small room – bare, save for a fireplace, rug, table, chairs and a spare behind the door, next to an axe, and a crate of split wood and kindling.

Tommy summoned his lodger, William Elbray, a free man, who quickly appeared. Elbray – with his mate Private Robert Trottman – who also lived at the house – had been shifting crates about outside the room.

Jones drew a tight circle in the air just above the tabletop. Elbray left, returning with a nod for the vicar and a tray of tea things, with a stale-looking loaf and a lump of lard.

Trottman finished the barricade with his back to the entrance. Grabbing the bottle and mug he had stowed there. He opened the front door and sat cross-legged as he withdrew a pouch from his vest pocket. Taking his sweet time, he stuffed tobacco in his tiny pipe, sauntered over to a lamp, and using a stick, transferred the flame to the pipe’s bowl. The lamp he then took for company. It had been such a simple couple of tasks – to what end he did not ponder – that Trottman had refused any reward.

Jones set down a large ashtray next to the lit candle as Clode removed his cape and slung it ‘round the back of the chair Jones had offered. As he sat, he looked out the window. He’d leave before it was too dark. He lay his cane on the rug beside him, freed the notebook and placed it on the table. Jones took a seat, Elbray poured tea, and their mugs rose to his “Bon Voyage!”

When a cabin had become free on a ship to England a fortnight ago, Captain William Wilkinson of the sailing ship, Indispensable, offered it to a joyous Clode and now had it readied for the voyage. The man, for some time, had made no secret of his urgent wish to go home. Without his cash, there’d be no passage, nor salvation.

It’d been dicey cornering Jones, but it was his debtor who’d arranged to settle this evening – on the eve of departure! Before he’d call in the loan – a whopping £33 – he just wanted to relax. It’d been a stressful couple of weeks. There seemed a never-ending list of people to inform of his return to England! And he still had to be in Parramatta in the morning to finish his shopping before lunch with the good doctor. He rolled his shoulders and slowly rotated his neck. The resultant sigh was long and heavy. He looked at his friend and smiled the smile of a man whose fortunes were about to turn.

The weeks prior had been fraught for Jones, too. He’d hunted every haunt where cash at crushing rates tricked poor saps into believing they were getting ahead. But the officers, awfully used to their boost in wealth, had ensured there was none to be had. Hope dimmed to a dot.

The vicar joyfully regaled his plans to his host and his surly, near-mute boarder and was providing a list of the things to pick up from Parramatta when Elbray rose to close the shutters and make a beeline for the door. Clode stopped dead.

“Oh, do go on, Samuel!” Tommy said, tamping tobacco in his pipe, then drew the candle close. “He’s not leaving us …”.

Satisfied the man had not been so rude as to get up and head for the door, the vicar carried on.

Elbray fiddled with the kindling while he stole a backwards glance. His head dropped for a bit, then he straightened and picked up the axe, which vigorously shook until the man got a grip. Tommy stiffened and ran a hand, hard, over his face. Moving towards Clode – still jabbering on – Elbray tried to raise the butt of the axe head to render Clode unconscious, as was the plan, and failed. Elizabeth and Tommy hadn’t shared the next bit of the plan, but it wasn’t going to be good. He’d tried to do his part, but his will had scarpered. Staggering to the spare chair, he spun to sit, laying the axe against it and began sobbing.

The reverend turned to see him crouched; his head bent to rest in his hands. “Good lord!” He cried.

Tommy had knocked over his chair in the race to put an arm around Billy,

“What on earth is happening here? Is he quite alright?”

Tommy gruffly explained that the man had lately suffered a terrible loss. Clode joined him and they helped the poor soul to a wobbly stand and led him to his seat, where Elbray somewhat managed to wrangle his emotions. “I’m … s-s-s-sorry,” he sobbed to the table. Jones patted his shoulder and gave it a decent squeeze.

“I’ll just finish up for Billy,” he said. “Can’t have the fire go out. I wish you’d continue, Sam! Sit! I’ll be a minute, no more.”

And so, he did, becoming unsettled as he stared at Elbray, just sat there, looking edgy – never at him – and picking at candle wax. The wretch clearly wanted out of the tea party! In his line, he’d witnessed a surfeit of bereaved souls. This was not grief!

Annoyed, Clode smacked the notebook on the table. Elbray jumped. The vicar started to roughly address the man opposite. It took great effort for Elbray to look up but, when he did, Clode’s voice faltered as he recognised fear.

The boarder, on the other hand, had looked up to see his landlord lift the spare chair at a tilt, and jam it under the door handle. Elbray moaned, rubbed his eyes and blinked rapidly, focusing to see Jones swing then bring the axe down and hear the crack! of the blade biting into Clode’s skull. The dead man fell forward; his face smashing into the table with a smack! making the mugs dance.

Jones reefed Clode upright and growled at Elbray to steady him, now mumbling softly, while he secured him to the chair with lining ripped from his poncy cape.

At the rear of the house, the patrons had spilled into the backyard and sounded well oiled. Mrs Jones hadn’t called “Last drinks!”, nor had little Mary. Thomas, now nine, and Mary, seven, were camped overnight with neighbours. 

Everyone was following Elizabeth’s plan.

Leaving the thirsty mob for a second time, she again ran to check the barricade was intact. The wooden crates – seating for the pub – were stacked high just ahead of the front rooms, and surely had to be enough of a deterrent. They’d leave via the backyard – where they were mostly stood, anyway.

She called to Trottman, who confirmed once more that he was where he was supposed to be, just before the soldier slipped to a slump and drifted off into a booze-fuelled sleep. A sentinel was a precaution – the regulars were all here. Anyway, any do-drop-in now would be directed towards the rowdy lot around the corner. She made her way back to her customers – as the axe fell again and again.

“Stop it! Stop!” Elbray flapped about like a cut snake. “No, no, no, NO! Enough, man! Jaysus Chrrriiist! You’ve almost knocked his head off!” The blows had pitched the dead man, in his chair, face-first onto the table with another smack! What remained of his head – the rest had landed everywhere – along with his limp, blood-soaked chest, was slumped and oozing on the table, his arms dangling from his elbows.

Jones freed him from the binding then tipped his old friend off the chair that, like the table, was splattered with bloody-grey mush studded with shards of bone – and tossed it aside. Elbray then shifted the table and all atop – jerking mugs and splashing tea. He grabbed the chairs before joining Jones – who’d launched the loan book into the fire – to roll the macabre thing in the rug.

They shuffled their burden to the skilling – a multipurpose, separate room and door; attached to the rear of the house – and dropped it inside. Jones fetched the oil lamp from its hook and ran it over the cocoon. “Sweet Jesus!” The mound had moved. Though more likely an illusion created once Jones’s eyeballs began jumping to each pound of his heart, he couldn’t be sure.

Pushing past a hyper-ventilating Elbray, he flipped open the rug, drew a knife from his belt and slit the priest’s throat ear to ear.

Before returning to the house via the front door, they washed up after a fashion in a horse trough nearby.

The crowd had thinned – some carrying others home – but there were still about a dozen of them in the big back room. If they’d been spotted by a rum-soaked wretch, they had concocted a yarn about helping so-and-so butcher carcasses – and had one given to them for their efforts.

They arrived in time to join Constable Collins as he led the sing-along while they downed mugs of rum. Still singing and swaying about. Jones used his pocketknife to scratch blood from under and around his fingernails.

Elizabeth soon ceased serving and encouraged the visitors to be on their way, though Jones and Trottman were called to round them up and drive them out. It was then their night began.

Brickfields: worksite and suburb.

Brickfields was a pock-marked expanse of huge, deep pits; dug for brick-making clay. Though the target was rarely reached, it was initially decreed to be ten thousand per month – rising exponentially as to need.

The brickfields sat opposite a row of houses. These were convict-built, of modest plan and rickety construction, and a whopping 60 feet apart, where the neighbours were all freed convicts.

The English brought everything required to set up a brick enterprise – except skilled brick-makers. They’d managed to stow brick moulds and some suspect-looking tools, a low store of lime for mortar, as well as 50,000 British-made bricks which served the fleet as ballast. These were earmarked for fleet captain now Governor Arthur Phillip’s two-storey, Georgian residence.

Incredibly, also missing from the talent lineup was an architect!

The cove’s bricks – fired in kilns on site – were inferior, to say the least, with scant skills available to cover the entire, tricky and laborious business of brickmaking. Concerned about slow progress, Governor Phillip sent word for the Second Fleet to send convicts with a range of skills the settlement lacked, over others. And more lime, which was scarce in the cove, for mixing mortar. As it was, they’d been reduced to collecting and burning shells, and destroying centuries-old native middens – tidy rubbish piles made from mussel- and oyster-shells.

Phillip let his incredulity be known at the serious oversight of the bugger-all expertise provided and demanded that, if any progress was to be made at the colony, professional brick-makers and architects must be on the very next ship.

When night properly fell, Jones ventured into the street with the oil lamp swinging. Farther apart than the houses were braziers, lit more to define streets at night than to provide light. He looked up and down. All quiet. All clear. He had started for the skilling, when he heard his name called. Spinning, he caught sight of Constable Collins farther up the street, who’d turned to see his mate, busy with a lamp. He had wondered what it was that Jones had lost as he swung it to and fro. Collins called, “All good, Tommy?” Jones waved him away with, “Grand, Eddie! Goodnight now!” The policeman turned again, raised an arm and swaggered off.

People wandering about at night was not odd. The copper knew many were doing the things at night that they couldn’t achieve by day, the bulk of which he ignored. He had reached the intersection, about 50 yards ahead, and turned left to finish his rounds.

Jones – his heart racing – had dropped to his knees. He put down the lamp and placed his forehead gently on the b; his hands he wrapped around the nape of his neck. Though a good mate, Collins would not, this time, turn a blind eye.

With Collins no longer in view, Jones shook his head, rose, and jogged to the skilling. No need to upset the sensitive, he thought.

“It’s now,” he said, arriving later than expected, and picked up his end of the rug, waiting for Nervous Nelly to grasp his. “Lift!!” It took another go before they had it on their shoulders,

At a clip, they crossed the dirt road to the pits, and lay down the bundle. Elbray paced as Jones sprinted for the lamp – still in the middle of the street – and, returning, set it down at the closest pit’s edge. Taking either end, they rolled the corpse from the rug into the pit where it landed with a splash in soupy water.

There were two yelps as they recoiled. The hands had floated to the surface in tandem – a sickly, milky grey. The water gurgled as the head rose – misshapen and ghoulishly bobbing and glistening – before settling backwards at a gruesome angle. Elbray whimpered the entire time he kept lookout.

Jones nicked tools stowed beneath a bush. He chopped branches from the wild shrubbery that he criss-crossed over the pit, before grabbing the lamp, while Elbray rolled the rug. This they each tucked under an arm, and bolted home.

Stained with blood and mush, the men now joined Elizabeth, and they worked throughout the night. As the three did every night after the revellers had gone, Elbray relayed pails of water to his landlords, who sluiced the house inside and out. The tamped-clay floor of the small room was strewn with ash, walls whitewashed, and the rug burned.

Elbray took up a spade and worried the woodpile stacked against the skilling. It collapsed, rolling logs flat to hide the bloodied ground.

While dawn was still about an hour away, Trottman slipped into the neighbouring house and roused the fully clothed Jones children, telling them that their dadda had given them a special job. Thomas wrenched Mary off her straw-filled sack and – with no shoes to don – they set off on the made-up errand.

Spine-chilling screams rang out just before dawn. A worker had arrived to find his tools “interfered with”, and his pit laced with freshly cut branches. Beckoning to a man cutting back bushes nearby, the two removed the covering, expecting to find the usual stolen loot.

A stream of people was arriving. Thomas and Elizabeth ran, and were first to the pit, as two men – who were ranting, rattled and clearly the owners of the fuss – jumped in, landing in slush that settled around their thighs. Moaning, they tried to lift the corpse but when the head all but fell apart, all hell broke loose.

The commotion brought the town.

As word reached Phillip’s successor, Governor John Hunter, he led the charge to the site with heads of police and justice – the crowd parting as he approached. Next was colony chaplain, Rev. Richard Johnson, who had married the Joneses. Having roused the colony’s surgeon, Dr Harris, he had accompanied Johnson to a most foul scene.

The doctor, whose cook was now preparing lunch for himself and his revered guest, now before him, floating in his priestly garb – almost decapitated – in a watery grave. Johnny Harris had to be lowered to the ground when he began to shake, and his knees buckled. As he sat, his eyes grew wide and his mouth fell open, apparently paralysed in place.

Elizabeth ran to the house as Jones returned from alerting the army camp to the horror and – now with a large audience – loudly accused the pit-worker of the gravest sin. So persuasive was he, that the man was arrested, charged and being led away when a ray of sunlight poked through a tree, pointing to a trampled, bloody track ending at the pit – and beginning at Jones’s front door.

Jones, roundly accused of the murder, became theatrical. “Never!” he wailed. “I loved him like a brother.” He dropped to his knees, giving in to wracking sobs. The governor instructed Jones to get in the pit and touch his “dearest friend”, a challenge heartily accepted. And to prove it, the bald-faced liar said he would jump in and kiss the kindest of men, his hometown friend! Disgusted, Governor Hunter yelled, “Get him out of my sight!”

During the sellout performance, policemen were tripping over evidence around the perimeter of the house – much of it in the skilling and backyard, where fire had claimed carpet, but not yet a ripped, blood-soaked cape and a cane – monogrammed, both. Blood and other grisly material were stuck to an axe and hunting knife – wrapped together in bloody cloths – and stuffed under potatoes in a chest.

Almost home, Trottman shouted at the children to run and play, “and don’t come back till it’s dark!” Something was very wrong. He slipped into a gully behind the Joneses place, and listened, petrified of the sound of angry protesters and the sight of policemen milling around the property. Struggling with the question ‘Why?’ he was still grasping at scenarios when arms reached down, and he was reefed out of the gully.

“That’s him!” came a shout. “He was here!”

Trottman was arrested, charged and bound, though later released – no wiser about what had transpired – after the doctor’s examination and a clear, unflinching account of his most recent involvement with the family. No, he did not feel the need to quiz his friends on why he was set the odd tasks. Did he receive compensation? “What the devil for?” he snapped.

In the wash up, the man had spent the morning – at the Joneses behest – visiting the sawmill a ways off, where the sawyer had reserved a broad trunk for woodworker Trottman’s inspection, from which Thomas wished to craft a canoe. Elizabeth had instructed the children to accompany him on the errand, and to behave.

Elbray, kneeling by his cot in the bedroom-cum-store – a glorified lean-to at the rear – was shaking and peering out the window. Police burst in, launched him upwards and removed his clothing. Dr Harris then entered to conduct his examination. The surgeon did not speak as he collected what was wedged under the man’s fingernails and took scrapings from his boots. Elbray was then unceremoniously marched – in his underclothes – through the jeering, heckling crowd he feared he would meet again.

With Thomas strip-searched, reeking with evidence, and in custody, police found Dr Harris, much distressed, at the hideous scene. As coroner, he had to supervise the deceased’s removal from the pit by six army men, and called, “Gently!” several times, before the body lay before him on a muddied shroud. Once composed, he and police made a beeline for Elizabeth. At the house, Mrs Jones was trying to remove evidence on the path out the back with a broom. 

They searched Elizabeth, and took her bloody clothes, leaving her with only her underthings. She hadn’t stopped talking, though she’d failed to explain anything. Now, on the march to the front room, and on the front foot, she blamed a heavy period for the state of her clothes. Dr Harris examined Elizabeth there and then, and growled at her for the obvious lie.

In the room, blood was seeping through the whitewashed walls and, along the perimeter, ash had congealed into sticky puddles on the floor. This she waved away as there having been a set to among a few customers, after they’d taken the fight to the small room. She was charged and taken away.

Throughout, there had been – and was still – no sight of the children as their parents and Billy were shackled and imprisoned within the police gaol. Child welfare and protection had yet to make the town’s agenda.

Elizabeth had stipulated that, if questioned, they were to confidently assert that the night at the tavern had been ordinary, and to ask those present, starting with Constable Collins, who’d arrived about 6pm, polished off rum after rum, and had left between 10 and 11pm to finish his rounds and head home.

But the plan had long ago veered off a cliff.

Elbray hadn’t reached the lock-up before the beans were spilled in a word salad. He also proffered that Jones had murdered before and would again.

At the gaol, motivated more by eyeballing the murderers of his friend, Johnson began to revel in taunting them about their imminent “launch into eternity”. A man of religious cloth – of any stripe – was duty-bound to visit the gaol, absolve sins, and counsel the wicked. There would be no absolution for this horrid, brutal lapse in humanity. Not from him and certainly not God.

The Chaplain to the Settlement had been fit to throw in the towel, and the past week had just about finished him. The soul of the colony was evil. Hard men became harder, and decency, respect and morals were long gone. Worse, the population of roughly a thousand desperate people were found ridiculing and shunning religion. Prostitution, extra-marital dalliances, and the resultant children born – along with gonorrhoea – became the norm.

Johnson insisted a church was needed, and quickly. Governor Phillip agreed, but both he and his temporary successor, Lieutenant-Governor Francis Grose, denied the priest any funding. He was waved away with the bland statement that the building of one was none of the government’s business, despite Johnson and his wife, Mary, wishing to also use the church to educate two-hundred children.

Self-funded, in 1793, Johnson had his church. Built near Tank Stream, it was a long, T-shaped, wattle-and-daub structure able to seat five hundred, where services and lessons were held.

As an up-yours to his main obstacle, Rev. Johnson named the church St Phillip’s – with a deliberate double-L – after the governor. Four years later, the government reimbursed him for the building – £67 and some change, which rather puts Thomas Jones’s debt into sharp perspective.

At the time of Clode’s funeral, the colony was between churches. The convicts had revolted, buoyed by the general population, particularly Catholics and dissenters from all army ranks, who weren’t well pleased when Phillip decreed that attendance at Sunday Methodist service was mandatory for all. The heavy-handed approach to instilling values and decency was met with fire in 1797, and St Phillip’s was razed.

Johnson, who’d vividly visualised the final, fitting tribute for the missionary, had designed instead a funeral procession, to be led by the church’s disembodied bell anchored to a horse-drawn cart. The hearse behind would carry the remains of a truly good man.  The procession would circle the precinct, allowing people to line the streets, hang their heads, some maybe offer up a lament, some crossing themselves. The cortège would come to rest on the grassy ridge where’d he’d led the entire fleet in a service of thanks on 26 January 1788 as soon as everyone on the ships had disembarked.

The morning of 4 July, Johnson made an early start to a hectic day.

Inside the gaol, he found the couple – gaoled separately – defiant, unrepentant, stoic and without a scintilla of remorse. They were still ridiculously maintaining their innocence.

Rev. Johnson left both cells sickened and disgusted and proceeded to Elbray’s accommodation. To his satisfaction, the boarder’s remorse was seeping through his pores. The man was a wretched specimen – sat there on a filthy cot, rocking back and forth, sobbing gently; his nerves shredded. Though he’d never say so, Johnson felt an angry glee.

The minister introduced himself, further qualifying his standing as a close friend of the victim and immediately regretted his tone. The man was hanging by a thread. He did not look up, nor even register the minister’s presence, wildly sobbing, until the cell door swung open, and a guard brought in a chair and left. Johnson sat, resting his satchel on his lap.

Appealing to what was left of Elbray’s sensibilities, and to help Johnson understand, the minister asked him to recount the whole sordid night. The man eyed him warily and became agitated. Police, finding all evidence needed to convict, had thought the question redundant.

Speaking gently was a stretch, but he managed to convey God’s mercy for those who truly repented but skipped the comforting prayers that usually followed.

Elbray looked up. His eyes more crimson and weepier than hopeful. He wiped his nose with the back of a hand, then fixed on the minister’s face where he searched for – and thought he’d found – a shred of solace. Just for a few minutes, he wanted to cherish the feeling.

The minister took up his satchel and withdrew his journal, pen and ink pot. Opening the pot, he put it gently on the cell’s only shelf, beside his chair where he now placed his satchel. His higher-ups had requested he make note of anything shared by the three, as there was plenty of evidence but no clear motive for such a brutal slaying. The three hadn’t said a word. Speculation among the colony was rife, and only muddied the waters.

Johnson, startled, roughly opened the journal, manoeuvred the satchel to his lap beneath his book, and stabbed the pen in the well the second he realised the man was making a statement.

Elbray had quickly let fly with a blow-by-blow of the murderous night, singing like a canary, and throwing dark shade on his former landlord, repeating his claim that the murder was not Jones’s first, though did not offer proof.

Johnson had been wildly scribbling when he raised his hand to stem the flow, and also to address a persistent thought. Was all this a weak attempt to avoid swinging? Did he expect him to deposit a good word with the powers that be?

As it transpired, the account was full and clearly damning, and certainly put paid to any lofty thoughts of leniency – for any of them. It surely couldn’t be possible to be more horrified than on seeing the mutilated remains of a fellow priest and godly friend, but here he was, forcing his hand to record the words.

However, the more the man – childlike now – revealed to him and the manner of its delivery, the more he believed that the sad soul needed to fully confess the plan – and everyone’s role in it. Whether or not he was spared seemed immaterial.

Johnson called on God for assistance in seeing the man and not the absolutely unspeakably heinous crime. He gave it a determined shot with the little charity he felt. He was surprised to find the raw, unblinking and unadulterated truth staring back at him.

Pressed for a reason he became involved, Johnson almost missed the man softly saying that he was to be rewarded with two, unopened bottles of rum. Elbray avoided his glare, as the priest raised his knees to balance the journal and pen on the satchel. It all slipped as Johnson gripped the seat either side of his chair, feeling the wood give as his fingernails bit.

Today, Thursday, 4 July at 12 noon on the knocker, the disembodied bell of St Phillip’s Methodist Church rang out for the imminent funeral of the former living saint, Rev Dr Samuel Clode. Later this afternoon, the priest would be sought to officiate. Johnson would speak for forty-five minutes – and would recall none of it – then, totally spent and feeling unwell, he would need assistance back to his seat.

The condemned sat up straight and stared up at the tiny window, through its bars, mesmerised for a moment, his sorry head to one side. “Why are the bells ringing, sir?”

Johnson drew a deep breath before telling the damned that the bells tolled for the man that he, in company, had so ferociously murdered. The news crushed the wretch, who folded in on himself, trembling. The minister let the ensuing silence hang over the man’s conscience. He hoped it would lead him to a tell-all about the preceding fortnight his landlords took to devise – and itemise – the plan and modus operandi.

Roughly collecting his things, Johnson rose to leave when it appeared the visit was over.

“It took the fortnight to plan – right down to role-playing and rehearsing what we had to say, you know, if we got nicked…”.

Johnson literally dropped his bundle before collecting himself – and his things – to be seated and composed, once again, with his journal on his satchel on his lap; the pot opened, and his pen scribbling “fortnight to plan”.

He was about to learn the whole backstory – the elusive motive – to the bloody night.

William Elbray said that he wasn’t involved in the plan’s design – Thomas and Elizabeth were its authors, mainly the latter – nor any input into the modus operandi attached to each stage. He did not know what was to occur after he’d knocked out the man.

“But you surely did not think things were going to improve, did you?” Johnson shook his head.

“I was to do what was asked, knock him out, then go,” Billy said, punctuating each word with a fist striking his knee.

Johnson had penned at least fifty pages in all – with the most fulsome—gruesome account of the afternoon, night of 2 July and the morning of the 3rd. The minister was left dumbstruck. It was many hours later when he left with a journal eaten up by notes and stumbled to his home. There, barely managing to dress himself, he prepared for the funeral as the bell once more tolled.

Alone and exhausted later, both his wife and daughter having retired for the night, he had the horror for company as he clearly and accurately transcribed his notes into damning sentences, each one laden with apportioned blame. The report – later, typewritten, producing forty pages – was delivered late that night by Johnson himself, who’d marched up to the governor’s residence where he delivered the missing piece of the puzzle. Figuring a plea for mercy regarding William Elbray might render his account dubious, he turned and left the governor, offering up instead an agonised prayer for the soul destroyed by drink.

Next day – Friday, 5 July – and without a trial, all were officially sentenced to death. The Jones home was torn down and burned where it fell. In its place stood three gallows. Nailed to each upright were the names and crimes of the condemned.

Thomas and Mary were soon to be orphans, homeless and alone – somewhere. The children’s whereabouts – including that of five-year-old Ann – was subject to conjecture as they did not seem to rate a mention during the whole ordeal. Even their parents weren’t recorded as mentioning their offspring, though this does not mean it hadn’t occurred.

A ‘gala’ day in the colony.

Saturday, 6 July 1799 was a gala day for almost all in the colony, who were already filling the street. Parents with toddlers on their shoulders, men who’d downed tools, women – some with shabby parasols – and convicts up poles and trees, all jostled for the best viewpoint. They were joined by hawkers, fiddlers and the odd pickpocket, keen to milk the crowd.

A noose was around all three necks, and with minutes left to live, the couple – incredibly – kept up the innocence malarkey and were pummelled with boos, stones and rotten fruit from the incensed mob.

Brought to the spot bound together and balancing on a cart, they were marched onto the platform – Private Thomas Jones in his red and white uniform with its tall, black cap with a peak instead of a brim.

Also assembled at the gallows were Governor John Hunter, Dr John Harris, colony surgeon, Rev. Richard Johnson, colony chaplain, and a slew of other notables. Behind each of the condemned were hangmen.

Rev. Johnson raised his arms calling for calm as he addressed the baying throng from the platform. He drilled home the extent of the abject depravity that drove three monsters to mutilate and murder such a revered and holy man.

Johnson assured the crowd that the heinous deed would be recorded in history as the crime that left a shocking, indelible stain on Sydney Cove’s earliest years, adding that he felt safe saying that the condemned’s souls were, and would always be, black.

Johnson had gathered insights from the reverend doctor’s patients and associates, and these he began to share until his words were choked by the beauty of the testimonies. Composing himself, he only managed to spit out a monotonous verse from Jeremiah, followed by an entirely brief and bitter prayer for the wretched souls ahead of them meeting their Maker.

Stepping aside, he made room on the platform for the Governor who now stood before each murderer to read the charges, while Johnson made room in his heart for the damaged, remorseful “Billy”.

Before first addressing Private Jones, he raised the back of his hand causing all who saw to gasp, swung it and knocked the hat off his putrid head. The crowd cheered rather wildly, as it did with each proclamation of “Guilty!”

Refused the slight dignity of wearing hoods, as the condemned cast no shadow at noon, cheers went up as the murderers dropped.

Johnson vowed there and then to get his family out of this festering cesspit. They were living in England, quite damaged, only months later.

Interrogated by the ignorant men of the London Society of Missionaries, he was criticised for his inability to arrest such shocking behaviour. Months later again, Richard Johnson, 71, was dead.

Without Elbray’s enormous, remorseful contribution, and Johnson’s detailed notes, which when later typed, filled 40 pages, nought would be known of the plan, who took which role, and the shocking details of the deeds of the damnable night.

Thomas and Elbray’s bodies were gibbetted – chained into an iron cage, dangled from street poles in the town square and left to rot. It was a dual-edged move satisfying an angry mob, while providing the ultimate deterrent against crime. They were the 20th and 21st male persons hanged at Sydney Cove, yet only the second and third in eleven years who had swung for murder.

Sixty-five years later, in 1866, Sydney Council conducted a small excavation under where Town Hall stands today. Unearthed were two graves, quite a distance from the about to be discovered original colonial cemetery – where god-fearing people took up their final residence within consecrated ground. And for which the two occupants of the graves clearly did not qualify.

After years of research, the skeletons were provisionally identified along with the horrific reason they lay there, though the exact date this occurred is not clear. Thomas Jones, still in his NSW Corps’ private’s uniform, and William Elbray – had been found. Their whereabouts now is unclear, though all remains found in the holy section had been moved to Rookwood Cemetery or St John’s Anglican Church, Parramatta.

Female bodies of deceased criminals were autopsied – for teaching purposes – which included the long-protested English practice of dismemberment and crude disposal of body parts.

Second woman to hang.

Elizabeth was the second hanged woman to be “given over” to the colony’s surgeon. Dr Harris supervised students of anatomy and, with the body on the slab, observations were made. Details of her stature and build were all recorded. Organs were removed, discussed, dissected and tossed, Then, her body was dismembered. When done, her remains were thrown into the body-parts pit at the rear of the surgery. In torrential rain, a flood would take the waterlogged pit’s butchered occupants and sail them into the street.

Elizabeth’s remains could be anywhere, and everywhere, near the location of Dr Harris’s surgery, or carried off by animals.

While young Thomas had survived to continue the dubious line – and add four children to other people’s – Mary’s trail (so far) vanished that day. Their half-sister, Ann Jones, remains lost and without more details, such as her mother’s name and history, may be for some time.