On 14 October 1842, five of the most powerful men in Van Diemen’s Land sat down in Hobart to discuss a convict who wouldn’t go to church.
The Executive Council that morning was the Governor, Sir John Franklin, together with the senior officer of Her Majesty’s forces, the Colonial Secretary, the Colonial Treasurer, and the Chief Police Magistrate.[i] Their business was Minute No. 161, filed under a marginal note that undersells the stakes considerably: “Jones’ refusal to attend Divine Service at Port Arthur.” But Franklin did not treat it as a trivial matter of prison discipline. He told the Council he had called them together to discuss “the Discipline and security of the Penal Establishment at Port Arthur,” and that he was seeking their advice on a case that touched something he regarded as dangerously close to breaking point. [ii]
The convict in question was Richard Jones: Dublin Ribbon Society secretary, accused mutineer, and, in the eyes of the colony’s most senior official, a genuine threat to order at the Empire’s harshest prison.
A Dublin conspirator bound for Van Diemen’s Land
Jones was no ordinary transportee. Historian Hamish Maxwell-Stewart’s study of shipboard mutinies identifies him as the permanent secretary of Dublin Ribbonism from the early 1830s. This was an anti-Protestant secret society that combined agrarian defence with the trappings of a benefit club, complete with its own passwords, oaths, and quasi-Masonic signs.[iii]
Image: TAHO CON33-1-26
Dublin Castle[iv] suspected him of a hand in the 1836 destruction of the William III statue on College Green, and he had worked to link the Dublin lodges to Ribbon networks across northern Leinster and Ulster.[v] Convicted in Dublin in 1840 and sentenced to seven years transportation, he sailed for Van Diemen’s Land on the Isabella Watson in May 1842.[vi]
Image: Dublin City Library
He put his organising experience to immediate use. According to Maxwell-Stewart’s reconstruction of the shipboard plot, Jones approached the farm labourer James Byrne on 15 May and produced what was probably a Ribbon catechism book to bind him into a conspiracy to seize the ship, the same oath-and-signs apparatus he had run in Dublin. Most of his co-conspirators came from Cavan, Longford, and Meath, and all gave their religion as Catholic. Private Barney Macanally, relieving himself at the ship’s heads, was overheard telling two prisoners that sympathetic guards would “make their water on the pistols and flintlocks so that they would not go off” rather than help put down a mutiny. Later in the voyage another soldier was held in irons after he was seen exchanging Ribbonman signals with one of the prisoners.[vii] The plot was serious enough that, combined with two other attempts that year, Governor Franklin asked London to use naval vessels rather than merchant ships for future transports.[viii]
Jones and eleven others were charged with piracy in the Hobart Supreme Court in September 1842. When the Crown’s key witnesses, officers of the Isabella Watson, failed to appear, having sailed on to Sydney, the prosecution collapsed and Justice Montagu directed an acquittal.[ix] Jones reportedly thanked the judge; the judge, by newspaper account, replied that he had only done his duty. The colonial press had already been following the case for weeks, with the Launceston Examiner and Launceston Courier both naming Jones as “ringleader” of a plot they described as aiming at the murder of the ship’s Protestants.[x]
Acquitted of piracy, Jones was sent to Port Arthur to serve the probation stage of his original transportation sentence.
Refusing the pew
It was there that a second confrontation began, and this one not with muskets, but with a pew. Jones was Catholic. Port Arthur’s standing orders required all convicts to attend Sunday service, which meant, for a Catholic prisoner in 1842, sitting through Wesleyan Methodist worship. Jones refused.
Image: TAHO PWD266-1-1816
On 19 September 1842 he was charged before Commandant Charles O’Hara Booth on the complaint of the settlement’s superintendent, Mr Carte, with “positively refusing to attend the Place of Divine Worship,” and sentenced to six days’ solitary confinement. A week later, on 26 September, he was charged again for the same offence and given five more days in solitary. On 8 October, six days before the Executive Council met, he was flogged with thirty-six lashes for leaving the place of worship without authority. By the time Franklin brought the matter to his Council, Jones had already been punished three times in three weeks, and the punishments were escalating.[xi]
Jones did not just leave it at that. He tried to go over Booth’s head. He had earlier addressed an appeal to the colony’s Puisne Judge, believing, on the strength, he said, of words the judge had used at his piracy trial, that any prisoner treated harshly could apply to him directly. Franklin judged the appeal improper and returned it unread. Undeterred, Jones then sent a memorial to the Commandant and a separate letter to the Catholic priest Father John Joseph Therry, both dated 27 September, laying out his case: since arriving at Port Arthur he had been compelled to attend Wesleyan worship despite being Roman Catholic, had been punished for refusing, and asked to be allowed to remain in his cell on Sundays instead.[xii]
Image: Australian Dictionary of Biography
The Council convenes
What makes the Executive Council meeting of 14 October remarkable is not that a colonial governor took an interest in one convict’s punishment record: it is why. Franklin did not present Jones’s case to the Council as a matter of religious accommodation. He framed it as a security crisis.
He told the assembled Council that his recent tour of Tasman’s Peninsula had left him seriously alarmed. The numbers of men confined at Port Arthur had grown rapidly, and among them, he said, were “most desperate characters,” particularly recent arrivals from New South Wales and from Ireland – a description that fitted Jones precisely. He had just heard of “a most frightful case of attempted murder” by an absconder from the Coal Mines station and relayed the details to the Council before turning to Jones’s file. The Council then had the Commandant’s memorandum of 30 September read out, along with extracts from the magisterial records documenting Jones’s two solitary confinements, his memorial, and his letter to Father Therry.[xiii]
Franklin also had two older despatches read into the record: his own dispatch of 21 July 1841 to the Secretary of State, urging the appointment of a Roman Catholic clergyman to Tasman’s Peninsula, and a reply from Lord John Russell on the same subject. This shows that the problem was not new to Franklin in October 1842. He had been pressing London for a Catholic chaplain at Port Arthur for well over a year, and Jones’s public defiance had now brought the issue to a head in front of his own Council.[xiv]
Frustratingly for the historical record, the page or pages recording the Council’s actual advice have not survived among the documents so far located — the minute breaks off after the despatches are read, before any resolution is recorded.
Punishment continued — and, eventually, a concession
Whatever was decided in the room on 14 October, it did not end Jones’s resistance, nor Port Arthur’s problem. He was charged twice more for refusing church on the same grounds: on 21 November 1842 (“positively refusing”), and again on 26 November (“obstinately refusing”), each time drawing further solitary confinement under Booth’s signature.[xv] Jones was not an isolated case, either. Catholic prisoners at Port Arthur more broadly kept up the pressure, continuing to refuse Protestant service and to press for their own priest.[xvi]
Image: TAHO PWD266-1-1779
The concession Franklin had been asking London for since 1841 eventually arrived. Father William Bond was appointed the first resident Roman Catholic chaplain at Port Arthur, with a chaplain’s house built for him in 1844. This was a direct institutional response to the standoff that Jones’s file had forced onto the Executive Council’s table in October 1842. It was a slow, grinding win, bought with solitary cells and the lash rather than any dramatic victory, but it was a win: the very demand in Jones’s September memorial: recognition that a Catholic prisoner should not be forced into a Protestant pew, was, within roughly eighteen months, built into the settlement’s fabric.
Image: TAHO NS1013-1-1827
Jones himself was released from the first stage of probation on 3 February 1843 and received his certificate of freedom on 21 June 1847.[xvii] What became of him after that has not been established from the sources gathered so far.
[i] Minutes of Proceedings of the Executive Council TAHO EC4-1-8 14 Oct 1842, Z1474
[ii] Minutes of Proceedings of the Executive Council TAHO EC4-1-8 14 Oct 1842, p85
[iii] Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, “‘Those Lads Contrived a Plan’: Attempts at Mutiny on Australia-Bound Convict Vessels,” International Review of Social History 58 (2013), Special Issue, pp. 177–196, at p. 189, citing Tom Garvin, “Defenders, Ribbonmen and Others: Underground Political Networks in Pre-Famine Ireland,” Past and Present 96 (1982), pp. 133–155. See also Dictionary of Irish Biography, “Jones, Richard,” https://www.dib.ie/biography/jones-richard-a4338
[iv] Dublin Castle”: shorthand for the British administration in Ireland, seated at Dublin Castle — used here to mean the colonial authorities and police, not the building itself.
[v] Dictionary of Irish Biography, “Jones, Richard,” https://www.dib.ie/biography/jones-richard-a4338
[vi] TAHO CON33-1-26; Founders and Survivors, “FAS Convict Ship 366.04 Isabella Watson arrived 1842 at VDL Prosopography Index,” https://researchdata.edu.au/fas-convict-ship-prosopography-index/395282
[vii] Maxwell-Stewart, “Those Lads Contrived a Plan,” pp. 189–190
[viii] Maxwell-Stewart, “Those Lads Contrived a Plan,” p. 194, citing Launceston Examiner, 23 September 1842.
[ix] TAHO SC32-1-4
[x] Hobart Town Advertiser, 6 September 1842; Launceston Examiner, 6 August 1842; Launceston Courier, 8 August 1842
[xi] TAHO CON33-1-26
[xii] Minutes of Proceedings of the Executive Council TAHO EC4-1-8 14 Oct 1842, p85
[xiii] Minutes of Proceedings of the Executive Council TAHO EC4-1-8 14 Oct 1842, p85
[xiv] Minutes of Proceedings of the Executive Council TAHO EC4-1-8 14 Oct 1842, p85
[xv] TAHO CON33-1-26
[xvi] On The Convict Trail, “Catholic Chaplain’s House, Port Arthur,” http://ontheconvicttrail.blogspot.com/2015/12/catholic-chaplins-house-port-arthur.html
[xvii] TAHO CON33-1-26
King William III statue image: https://www.dublincity.ie/library/blog/statue-king-william-iii
