Fifty-three people went to the gallows in Van Diemen’s Land in 1826 – the single deadliest year of George Arthur’s governorship, and by some margin. It’s tempting to read that number as the story of a colony finally getting its violent criminal element under control. The Supreme Court’s own record for the year tells a different, and rather more uncomfortable, story: most of the people hanged in 1826 weren’t murderers at all. They were thieves.
The Supreme Court docket, by the numbers
Of the 53 executions carried out that year, only seven – five for murder and two as accessories to murder – involved a killing. That’s barely one in eight. Set against that: eighteen for burglary, fifteen for sheep stealing, two for theft, and one for arson – thirty-six people, or two in every three, hanged for offences where nobody was harmed at all. The remaining ten went to the gallows for armed robbery: menace and threat, but again, no body. Even counting those armed robbery cases alongside the murders, fully two-thirds of the year’s executions were for crimes committed against property, not people.
Sheep stealing alone – fifteen executions – outnumbers every category of killing combined. In a colony still short on livestock and focussed on protecting settler flocks, taking someone else’s sheep carried the same weight, in the eyes of the law, as taking someone’s life. That’s the real story of 1826: not a colony purging its murderers, but the full weight of Britain’s “Bloody Code” – a legal system that still hanged people for theft – applied at maximum severity inside a penal colony.
It’s also worth noting who was doing the stealing. Forty-two of the fifty-three people executed – better than three in four – were convicts already under sentence or men who had absconded from assigned service. This was overwhelmingly Arthur disciplining his own convict system, not the colony defending itself against outside threats.
A year told in six hanging days
The executions weren’t spread evenly through the year. They fell into six distinct clusters, almost all at Hobart, each timed to a Supreme Court sitting clearing its docket:
6–7 January, Hobart (14 people). The year opened with back-to-back hanging days: six for burglary, four for sheep or cattle stealing, and three for armed robbery. Not one murder among the fourteen.
17 February, Launceston (5 people). The only cluster outside Hobart, and about as close to a single-issue hanging day as the record gets: four of the five were executed for sheep stealing, the fifth for armed robbery.
4–5 May, Hobart (11 people). This is the pair of hanging days most people remember – the one where Matthew Brady’s gang went to the gallows alongside Thomas Jeffries, an escaped convict whose crimes ran to armed robbery, murder, rape and cannibalism. They deserve to be remembered plainly for what they were: armed and dangerous escaped convicts who robbed, terrorised, and in Jeffries’ case killed, their way across the colony. Whatever romance later attached to the word used for men like them, there is nothing in the court record to support it – and tellingly, even this cluster wasn’t mostly about killing. Of the eleven, five were hanged for armed robbery and three for burglary; only two, including Jeffries, were murder convictions, with one further man hanged for arson.
note – James Hopkins was reprieved and transported to Norfolk Island
13, 15 and 18 September, Hobart (23 people). By far the largest cluster – nearly half the year’s total – condensed into a single fortnight, and it splits cleanly in two. The 13th was the year’s most violent hanging day by a wide margin: five of its seven convictions were for murder or as an accessory to murder. The 15th and 18th were the opposite – sixteen people between them, every single one hanged for burglary, sheep stealing, or theft. Not one violent charge in either sitting.
Why the hangings came in batches
The clustering isn’t an accident of record-keeping — it’s how the court was built to run. On the same day as the second January hanging, 7 January 1826, the Hobart Town Gazette published a piece of correspondence that explains it directly.
Two months earlier, in November 1825, fifty Hobart Town citizens, led by Anthony Kemp, had petitioned Arthur in alarm at “the manner in which the banditti now at large have continued to evade apprehension,” blaming the delay between trial, sentence and execution for letting them keep offending. Arthur passed the complaint to Chief Justice Pedder and asked him to explain himself.
Pedder’s reply lays out, case by case, why sentencing and execution happened in batches rather than a steady trickle. The Supreme Court had to keep sitting until every prisoner on its file had been tried: “it must continue its Sittings until the gaol be delivered”, and no one was sentenced until the whole session concluded. Convention then required at least a week between sentence and execution in every capital case except murder. Add juries that wouldn’t show up before half past eleven, magistrates slow to forward depositions, and witnesses who failed to appear, and a session could drag on for months before closing all at once – at which point every condemned prisoner still waiting was sentenced together, and hanged together roughly a week later. That’s the mechanism behind 1826’s six hanging days: not six isolated decisions, but six moments when a backlogged court finally emptied its docket.
Arthur, for his part, didn’t accept the citizens’ diagnosis. His reply to the petitioners brushes past the backlog entirely and blames “a licentious Press” for encouraging the colony’s convict population toward “resistance to the constituted Authorities” – the delay in justice, he suggests, is the smaller problem.
The human cost, briefly
Where birth years survive, the condemned ranged from 18 to 73 years old, with an average age at execution of around 29. These weren’t hardened old lags exclusively – plenty were barely into adulthood.
What does this all mean?
If 1826 has a place in popular memory, it’s usually as the year Arthur’s colony was overrun with violent criminals and he hanged his way out of it. The court’s own records do not support that reading. The typical person hanged in 1826 wasn’t a killer – he was a convict who’d stolen valuables from a someone’s home, or someone else’s sheep. They were caught up in a legal system that still treated theft as a capital offence. The murderers were there, but they were the exception in that year’s execution toll, not the rule.
Note: figures, names and crime details drawn from Van Diemen’s Land Supreme Court trial records for 1826 during Governor Arthur’s administration.
Appendix: the fifty-three
Alternate spelling of names indicated in brackets. The crimes listed in the newspapers were not always accurate; the crimes in the list below are from the Supreme Court records for each person’s trial.
| Date | Name | Crime |
|---|---|---|
| 6 Jan 1826 | Harden, George (Harding) | Sheep stealing |
| 6 Jan 1826 | Johnson, John | Burglary |
| 6 Jan 1826 | Longworth, Samuel (Longman) | Burglary |
| 6 Jan 1826 | Major, James | Cattle stealing |
| 6 Jan 1826 | McCabe, James | Armed robbery |
| 6 Jan 1826 | Pollock, William | Sheep stealing |
| 6 Jan 1826 | Preece, William (Priest) | Armed robbery |
| 6 Jan 1826 | Wigley, Charles | Burglary |
| 7 Jan 1826 | Bosworth, Thomas | Burglary |
| 7 Jan 1826 | Brown, James | Sheep stealing |
| 7 Jan 1826 | Brown, Richard | Armed robbery |
| 7 Jan 1826 | Craven, William | Burglary |
| 7 Jan 1826 | Green, John | Sheep stealing |
| 7 Jan 1826 | Miller, Richard | Burglary |
| 17 Feb 1826 | Eales, James | Sheep stealing |
| 17 Feb 1826 | Eales, William | Sheep stealing |
| 17 Feb 1826 | Bell, Thomas | Sheep stealing |
| 17 Feb 1826 | Hallam, Richard (Haltham, Holton) | Sheep stealing |
| 17 Feb 1826 | Pawley, Thomas (Pauley) | Armed robbery |
| 4 May 1826 | Brady, Matthew | Armed robbery |
| 4 May 1826 | Bryan, Patrick (Bryant) | Armed robbery |
| 4 May 1826 | Jeffrey, Thomas (Jeffries) | Murder |
| 4 May 1826 | Perry, John | Burglary |
| 4 May 1826 | Thompson, John | Murder |
| 5 May 1826 | Brown, William | Armed robbery |
| 5 May 1826 | Goodwin, James | Arson |
| 5 May 1826 | Gregory, John | Burglary |
| 5 May 1826 | Hodgetts, Samuel | Armed robbery |
| 5 May 1826 | McKenney, James | Burglary |
| 5 May 1826 | Tilley, William (John) | Armed robbery |
| 13 Sep 1826 | Dunnings, Thomas | Accessory before the fact – murder |
| 13 Sep 1826 | Everett, Edward | Accessory before the fact – murder |
| 13 Sep 1826 | Smith, William | Murder |
| 13 Sep 1826 | Taylor, John | Theft |
| 13 Sep 1826 | Waters, George | Theft |
| 13 Sep 1826 | Jack (otherwise called Richard) | Murder |
| 13 Sep 1826 | Dick | Murder |
| 15 Sep 1826 | Balfour, Thomas | Burglary |
| 15 Sep 1826 | Brace, George | Burglary |
| 15 Sep 1826 | Brown, Patrick | Sheep stealing |
| 15 Sep 1826 | Clark, John | Burglary |
| 15 Sep 1826 | Dadd, John | Burglary |
| 15 Sep 1826 | Edwards, James | Burglary |
| 15 Sep 1826 | McFarlane, John | Burglary |
| 18 Sep 1826 | Cable, Robert | Sheep stealing |
| 18 Sep 1826 | Cruitt, John | Sheep stealing |
| 18 Sep 1826 | Davis, John | Sheep stealing |
| 18 Sep 1826 | Farquharson, George | Sheep stealing |
| 18 Sep 1826 | Pearson, John | Burglary |
| 18 Sep 1826 | Rowles, James | Theft |
| 18 Sep 1826 | Savell, Thomas | Sheep stealing |
| 18 Sep 1826 | Swinscow, Timothy | Burglary |
| 18 Sep 1826 | Wickens, William | Burglary |
