Agricultural labourers transported to Australia after the 1830's rural riots
Introduction

. . . the worst used labouring people upon the face of the earth. Dogs and hogs and horses are treated with more civility; and as to food and lodging, how gladly would the labourers change with them!
William Cobbett

The rural population of England increased sharply after the end of the Napoleonic Wars aided by increased population growth and the return home of a quarter of a million demobilised soldiers and sailors. By the close of the third decade of the nineteenth century there had been a huge increase in the rural population and a corresponding increase in the potential farm labour work-force. Unemployment was widespread and a succession of poor seasons in the late 1820s and early 1830s had greatly reduced agricultural output. Horse and hand powered threshing machines, first used to help overcome a labour shortage created by the wars, were being widely used to replace less efficient thrashing by hand held flails; a method which had been in use since the middle ages and was the ploughman's traditional winter work. The farm labourers, identifying threshing and other machines used for the abridgement of rural labour as the cause of their unemployment, embarked on the greatest machine breaking episode in English history during what became known as the Swing Riots.

'Captain Swing', the mythical leader of the Swing-rioters, was named for the swinging arm of the flail used in hand threshing and local groups of rioters and machine breakers were loosely controlled by leaders referred to as 'Captains'. The general pattern of rioting - machine breaking often followed by demands for money, food or beer - applied to all affected areas but the crimes for which the rioters were transported revealed some variation between counties. Threshing machine breaking was virtually universal but paper machine breaking was confined to Buckinghamshire, Norfolk and Berkshire and workhouse demolition seems to have occurred only in Hampshire and Wiltshire. Machinery was destroyed in iron foundries near Andover in Hampshire and at Hungerford in Berkshire and extensive damage was done to a woollen cloth factory at Wilton in Wiltshire. A considerable number of arson attacks were made in several of the affected counties and some arsonists were amongst those executed but only five men and one woman convicted of that crime, all receiving life sentences, are known to have been transported to Australia which may reflect inherent difficulties associated with detection of arson rather than a paucity of arson attacks.

In some areas the rioters did succeed in getting slight increases in wages but the movement was crushed with extreme savagery. Early in 1831, instead of enjoying the improved conditions for which they had hoped, many of the rioters were in prison or on board hulks awaiting transportation to Van Diemens Land or New South Wales leaving wives and families destitute or, at best, dependant on sparse parish relief. Of the four hundred and eighty-six known to have been transported all but two (who were sent to Bermuda) came to Australia.1

Records have been found of the arrival in Australia of four hundred and eighty-­three men and one woman transported as a direct outcome of their participation in the Swing riots. Three hundred and thirty-six of those were sent to Van Diemens Land and one hundred and forty-eight to New South Wales. Thirty-two Swing-­rioter transportees died under initial or subsequent colonial sentence or in custody. Case histories beyond emancipation, often consisting of little more than a death record, may be constructed for about sixty-five percent of the remaining four hundred and fifty-two transportees.

Transports which arrived carrying all or a majority of convicts sentenced for their part in the Swing riots were welcome in Australia because they brought higher percentages of useful men who were political prisoners rather than criminals and were therefore more honest than the common felons who constituted the vast majority of transported convicts (see Table 1 in Chapter 2). In Van Diemens Land, where the majority of transported Swing-rioters were sent, the farm labourers were especially valuable in a predominantly rural economy and the artisans (including bricklayers, brick makers, carpenters, millwrights, sawyers, stone masons and wheelwrights) were useful in Public Works to which they were almost invariably appropriated and from whence they were assigned, as members of a loan gang, for specified periods to deserving settlers or institutions.

This account is not about the riots, which have been ably covered by George Rude and others.2 In brief; arson attacks and machine breaking began in Kent early in June 1830 and the disturbances spread, relatively slowly at first, from Kent northward to Essex and south-westward to Sussex. From West Sussex the rioting and machine breaking episodes moved to East Hampshire from whence they spread, with great rapidity, to involve more than twenty mainly southeast of England counties although serious disturbances occurred as far north as Yorkshire from which at least one offender was transported.

Four hundred and fifty-five transported Swing-rioters arrived in Australia in mid 1831 on the convict ships:

•  Eliza,3
• Eleanor,4 and
• Proteus.5

Of these:

• eighteen percent were sentenced to life,
• sixteen percent to fourteen years and
• sixty-six percent to seven years transportation.

Other convict transports arriving in 1831 and carrying only common felons or a majority of common felons had a much higher percentage of men with life sentences than had Eliza, Eleanor and Proteus. In March 1831 the Red Rover brought one hundred and sixty-six common felons to Van Diemens Land:6

• forty-one percent of whom had life,
• sixteen percent fourteen year and
• forty-­three percent seven year sentences

In November 1831, the Lord Lyndoch brought two hundred and sixty-two common felons and four Swing-rioters:7

• forty-­three percent of them transported for life,
• twenty-seven percent for fourteen years and
• thirty percent for seven years.

Seventy-three percent of the transported Swing-­rioters per Eliza, ninety percent per Eleanor and seventy percent per Proteus had no convictions prior to being sentenced for the crime for which they were transported, but only fifty-one percent of common felons per Red Rover had no prior convictions.

The transported Swing-rioters, as a group, differed from the general run of common felons sent to Australia in a number of ways. The pre-sentence occupations of four hundred and fifty-five transported Swing-rioters who arrived per Eliza, Eleanor and Proteus in 1831 were compared (see Table 2 in Chapter 2), with those of one hundred and sixty-six common felons who arrived per Red Rover and two hundred and sixty-two common felons who arrived per Lord Lyndoch also in 1831. There were much higher percentages of both artisans and agricultural labourers on Eliza, Eleanor and Proteus than on Red Rover or Lord Lyndoch. The average age of transported Swing-rioters, to the nearest year, was twenty-nine whereas the average age of common felons per Red Rover was twenty-six and of those per Lord Lyndoch twenty-four years. Fifty-six percent of the rioters were married or widowed but a mere thirty percent of the common felons per Red Rover and Lord Lyndoch had never been married. Reflecting their rural origins only twenty-six percent of rioters could read and write but fifty-one percent of common felons per Red Rover and forty-eight percent of those per Lord Lyndoch could do so.

Geoffrey Sharman

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