Why did they come?

While researching the Wallbridge family this week I was reminded of a story that I think is at the heart of why our ancestors ended up in Australia! Luke and Sarah Wallbridge emigrated from rural Dorset to the Gosford district in 1856, following two daughters who had arrived in Sydney a few years earlier. Luke was an agricultural worker from Turners Puddle, one of several hamlets and villages along the River Piddle (not a joke) that include 'Puddle' in their name.

About the time that Luke and Sarah were welcoming their third child in Turners Puddle, a story was playing out just 4 km upstream at the village of Tolpuddle. Six agricultural workers were convicted under an obscure English law and sentenced to transportation to New South Wales.

The back story is that wages for farm workers were about to fall from 7 shillings per week to 6 shillings on the back of increasing farm mechanisation. A group of workers in Tolpuddle formed a 'Friendly Society' and vowed not to work for less than 10 shillings per week. The landowners saw such organisations among workers as a huge threat to their profits and agitated for government action to stop what was effectively an early version if a trade union.

Six of the leaders of the society were charged and found guilty of swearing a secret oath. They were transported to New South Wales for 7 years (three were assigned to the Hunter Valley). James Brine, pictured above, was singled out for particularly brutal treatment by his assigned master in the upper hunter. He was labelled 'one of the Dorchester machine breakers'.

Meanwhile back in England the six men became popular heroes, martyrs for the union cause. They were labelled the 'Tolpuddle Martyrs' and 800,000 signatures were collected for their release. Their supporters organised a political march, one of the first successful marches in the UK. The public outcry worked and in 1836 the men were pardoned and returned to Britain.

Ultimately however, they won the battle, but not the war. After trying to make a living in Essex, James Brine and four of his fellow martyrs emigrated to Canada. Only one, James Hammet, remained in Dorset and he died penniless in a Dorchester workhouse in 1891.

Luke and Sarah's story is less dramatic, but the ultimate result was the same. As the industrial revolution progressed, mechanisation steadily displaced people from the working class. The first to go were possibly the cottage-industry crafters, but agricultural workers soon followed. Some would find work in the new factories, but many more would face a tough choice - move from the area where their families had lived for generations, or starve.

Some were forced into crime. Luke's brother Hervey Thomas Wallbridge was gaoled in 1841 for stealing potatoes to feed his family. Many others found guilty of such petty offences were transported to penal colonies overseas. Many moved to London, where they lived in poverty in the crowded slums. A lucky few, like Luke and Sarah, took up offers of assisted emigration to the Americas or Australia.

When I cast my eye across the list of my ancestors who came to Australia (from both my mothers's and fathers sides), they came in three waves. Many of my Ward and Parry ancestors came in the convict era between 1793 and 1840. By far the majority of these were convicts. The second wave were all in the 1850s, which I associate with the gold rush. There were gold-rush settlers among the families of my Ward, Parry and Kemp grandparents, but I have not found any that actually went to the goldfields, so they were more like industrial refugees than fortune seekers. 

The last arrival was my grandmother Isabel Stewart who arrived with her family from Scotland in 1913, and that is also a story of working-class people seeking a better life.