Jocelyn Henry Connor Thomas

Jocelyn Thomas was the first of our family to arrive in Tasmania (or Van Diemen's Land as it was then known). He and his wife Charlotte Partridge and children established our family from the North Down base near Port Sorell on the North Coast of Tasmania. The following is a brief description of Jocelyn and his life leading up to his settling at NorthDown. Unfortunately there are no pictures of this interesting person.

By 1780 the Jocelyn Thomas's father, the Reverend William Bartholomew Thomas, was Squire of Everton in Queen's County (as then known). He was also Rector of Clodagh, a parish across the River Barr to the east of Everton, and thereby in County Carlow. (Hence the post town for Everton was Carlow City). This was where Jocelyn and his brother Bartholomew (first and third in the family) were brought up, together with Barbara, who married John Cramer (lawyer); Henry, who gained distinction in the Peninsular War and elsewhere; and Marianne, who married Colonel George Burrell of China fame and died when her four children were quite young.

Jocelyn was sent to Eton and on to Trinity College, Dublin. He was a little under six feet tall, with brown eyes and brown hair, lean face and erect, athletic body. He had an active, imaginative brain, restless temperament and a tendency to allow enthusiasm to lead him into unwise decisions.

In 1791 Jocelyn was commissioned an ensign in the Clodagh Cavalry. No records of this unit have been preserved, but it is thought to have been a local "fencible" unit; the troouble of 1798 may have been looming and caused its formation. Jocelyn was obviously proud of his former prowess as an athlete when he wrote in middle age:

In 1812 at Emo Park I ran 100 yards, leaped a long leap & a high leap against Captain Sheldon, one of the Duke of Richmond's A.D.C.'s for a bet of 100 guineas between Lord Portarlington and Lord Henry Moore, Lord P. backing me. I won him the 100, victor in the long & the high leap & beaten in the 100 yards.

For a career, Jocelyn chose the land. He managed the Irish estates of English landlords, among them Lord Stanhope and Lady Portarlington. Judging by the books he brought to Tasmania, his training for estate management included a study of artistic landscaping.

Jocelyn married in 1808. His wife was the serene and pretty, blue-eyed Charlotte Partridge, six years his junior, daughter of Henry Partridge, K.C., recorded as Chief Justice of Ely. By 1820 their home held children Jocelyn Bartholomew, Katherine (Kate), Bartholomew (Bat), Samuel, Edward and Charles. Then they moved to the Continent where a son Henry was born but he died before Charlotte Mary was born at Bruges in 1823.

The reason Jocelyn left the home of his fathers in 1820 was the failure of a costly scheme for reclaiming 1,200 acres of tidal marshland from the sea, and his consequent financial embarrassment. His brother Bartholomew was also involved in this venture. The fateful scheme began in 1813 when the Rosslare Company acquired 'the entire slobs in the harbour of Wexford'. (Slob being mud, the slobs meant the mud-flats between high and low water.) The company included the Thomas brothers and their friend Wyrley Birch and presumably James Vere in charge of operations. Its story is best told by his brother Bartholomew's words, written later in Van Diemens Land:

I was induced to take a share in a speculation that presented the finest hopes ... this undertaking, the embankment of a large tract of land from the sea, gave employment to about two hundred men for seven years at a time when great distress and misery prevailed among the labouring classes of Ireland, but when the work was on the eve of completion an unprecedented high tide destroyed in one hour the labour of more than seven years, demolishing the whole embankment, together with twenty-six miles of drains that had been cut and twelve hundred acres of cultivated land. This disastrous event caused the undertaking to be abandoned . . .

The scheme was not all together hare-brained, but they apparently risked more than was wise, for the £40,000 loss on the venture embarrassed them both. Jocelyn and Charlotte Thomas left the Europe on 20 October 1823 with their seven children, the eldest, Jocelyn Bartholomew (referred to as J. B.) being fourteen, and the baby (with her mother's name of Charlotte) seven months. Their destination was Van Diemen's Land, the twenty-year-old island colony in the Southern Ocean round which ships sailed outward bound in the China trade.

Jocelyn's plans were to invest the remnant of his capital in pastoral land. Free grants in Van Diemens land were obtainable by those with the needed qualifications. He may, however, have considered also the possibility of a public service post in the colony before he left England (or the Continent?) for a letter of reference from Sir Henry Brooke Parnell, afterwards Baron Congleton, ran: 'I readily assure you that I have the highest opinion of his principles and fitness for any public employment'. There were other references in similar vein from people in high office at home. His well-wishers would have served him better if they had stated that he was too much of an unsophisticated, altruistic dreamer to succeed in an office for which he had no training, particularly in the public service of a corrupt penal colony.

The ship William Shand, as described in the Hobart Town Gazette, brought the Jocelyn Thomas family to the Derwent on 2 February 1824. With them were a number of merino sheep of which twenty-five were Jocelyn's, and came, it was said, from the flock of King George III. Shepherd and master had an unfortunate clash on the voyage. In the words of his son Bat, written some fifty years later:

We soon reached St Iago [presumably the Santiago on the west coast of Teneriffe] Here the Captain discovered we had too many dogs on board and insisted on leaving those belonging to the shepherds who had charge of merino sheep on board. Our shepherd old Jery was very angry and I believe never forgave my father for allowing his fine sheep dog to be sent ashore and keeping a lurcher and a half bred setter, both of which turned out perfectly useless as the lurcher, having been accustomed to kill hares, would not touch a kangaroo after the first one, and old Blucher found his occupation gone as there was little game and less time for shooting.

Of the arrival in Hobart Town and soon afterwards Bat wrote:

We had scarcely come to anchor when the Port Officer came off in his boat and in his train a dapper little man, a sort of jackal to the lion, telling my father it was customary to make presents to the officials, especially the Surgeon General. He took the hint and sent a pretty double gun of French manufacture with his compliments. Whether it had the desired effect I can't say, but Mr Evans, naturally a good-natured man - unlike the dilatory, impertinent upstarts of the present day - advised my father to take up his land on the northern side of the Island . . .

Jocelyn's search for land is recorded in a letter he wrote to Lieutenant Governor Arthur a few months after arrival. 'After exploring the country on horseback and on foot for the space of three weeks' he wrote, 'I returned to Hobart in despair'. The best of the Midlands had been, taken up in the preceding two years, but perhaps Jocelyn expected too much, for he declined a block near Tunbridge because the Blackman River was dry. He then decided on a block at the Snake Banks (now Powranna), but sold out when he discovered that most of it was subject to flooding. Finally, Jocelyn bought Donald Campbell's 500 acre block at Evandale. It and most other blocks of pastoral land were held under location orders which entitled settlers to occupy land pending survey and grant of title, but were not transferable. Lieutenant-Governor Sorell (Arthur's predecessor) had recognized that it was impracticable to prevent such transfers but Arthur took Campbell and Thomas to task for contravening the regulations. Finally he allowed the deal to stand, and Jocelyn took possession, naming the property Everton after his parental home in Ireland. Sending the merino sheep overland, Jocelyn chartered the brig Anne to take his family and possessions from Hobart Town to Launceston. Of this voyage and later events Bat wrote:

We . . . called in at Preservation Island where we saw the first of the natives, living with the sealers, paid a visit to old Governor Munro and shot some Cape Barren geese. We were delighted with the sail up the Tamar & arrived safely at Launton or 'Camp' as it was called . . .We pitched a large marquee in which my Father & we boys lived the first winter, Major MeLeod having insisted on my Mother & sister staying with them until a house was built. Just as we were about settled, Col. A. who had met my father in London called to see us & offered my Father a Govt. appointment which he unfortunately accepted & we removed to H.T. much to my Mother's regret & ultimately to our heavy loss as my Father, always too confiding, left his merino sheep, now numbering fifty, in the care of a friend who took such care of them that we never saw half of them again ... However, the change to us boys was certainly for the better as instead of driving bullocks & falling timber we were placed at old Mr Ts Academy and after leaving school . . . appr. as clerk to the Ld Board & Collector of Internal Revenue & a pleasant time we had of it, living at New Town & going in abt 4 miles walk night & morning . . .

This lasted till the time of Col Arthur's campaign against the natives who had committed many murders. That is as far as Bat got with his narrative, though he prepared headings for it which refer to happenings of the 1870s.

The family home, rented by Jocelyn from Dr James Scott, was Roseway Lodge, on the bank of Newtown Rivulet where Bakers Milk processing works stand. Bat gave no clue as to which of the boys went to James Thompson's Academy in the first year, 1825, when J. B. was sixteen, Bat fourteen, Sam twelve and Edward nine. Nor did he mention where his eldest sister Kate went to school, presumably somewhere in Hobart Town.

Throughout his lifetime his records were voluminous, but they left untold many, perhaps most, of the things we now regard as important. Jocelyn's post in Hobart Town was a new one-Colonial Treasurer. His main task was to keep safe the money handed to him once a quarter by the Collector of Customs. The convict population of Hobart abounded with expert thieves and as a matter of course the treasury chest attracted their attention. For one robbery of some £1,250 in silver coin-the culprits were betrayed and caught and the Treasurer was excused from making good the loss.

In 1832, however, an audit disclosed a shortage of several thousand pounds in the combined accounts of the Collector and the Treasurer. Neither officer was trained in bookkeeping, the accounts were in a muddle, and the auditors took nearly two years to finalize their estimate of the shortage. Neither officer could account for the position except on the basis of undetected robbery. The Treasurer was held responsible for the whole of the estimated shortage. He made it good by sale of property. He had considerable private debts also, with the result that all his property was sold under the sheriff's orders, and the family home after 1833 became young Bat's 500-acre grant, Milford, on the South Esk near the Corners (now Conara). The Collector of Customs, Rolla O'Ferrall, had become a wealthy money lender during his term in office and some of Jocelyn's private debt was to him. He also dealt in land - at least once - for in 1836 he sold a block near Deloraine twice over by means of forged title deeds, then departed for Sydney, but not before getting possession of North Down as mortgagee. From the forced sale that wrecked his estates (Roseway Lodge near Hobart Town, some thousands of acres of land near Port Sorell, more on the South Esk river, and various allotments about Launceston; details in V.D.L. press, Aug- 1833), Jocelyn Thomas senior, managed to save the properties of Everton, adjoining Talisker (MacLeod's) on Rose's Rivulet, near Evandale (`Old Everton can be traced now only by the fine trees standing on the site'), and Milford, on the South Esk, near Campbell Town, where his two storied brick house is still to be seen.

His interests at Port Sorell were thence-forward concentrated upon North Down, where he and his wife are buried. The land covered by this estate was originally granted to the lawyers John Ward Gleadow and Robert Pitcairn, but came into the hands of Captain Bartholomew Thomas, who left it to his nephews Samuel, Edward, and Charles. The three lived at North Down together until Sam's marriage to Barbara Moore, who was a daughter of Joseph Henry Moore, for many years Collector of Internal Revenue. Jocelyn Bartholomew Thomas, the eldest son (a J. P. from 1832), was in 1835 at `Riversdale' on the South Esk. He seems to have worked with his brother Bartholomew William, who was then at Milford, but he eventually settled at Everton. `Bat' moved to Appledore, near Devonport.

From Milford, Jocelyn repeatedly sought an inquiry into the circumstances of his dismissal from office, for there had been no prosecution. In 1836 he got word that it would be granted. Mightily cheered, he wrote to the Lieutenant Governor's secretary, Adam Turnbull: 'Can the Attorney-General give me back my reputation which Col A. destroyed? Yes, Sir, that he may & I have no doubt will do so at no distant period . . . I daily expect the commission of inquiry from England. But it never came. Jocelyn's belief that an inquiry would clear his name is one of the few facts that stand out clearly among the many complexities of the Thomas-O'Ferrall debacle. It seems odd now that a collector of public revenue should be allowed to lend money as a business, and that a Treasurer should have extensive pastoral holdings bearing a big load of debt; but in Arthur's day it was remarkable if military and civil officers did not engage in sidelines for personal profit. A notable exception was Lieutenant-Colonel Paterson of early Port Dalrymple fame. 'Never possessing any money beyond his salary, his relative penury was considered almost a scandal.' Arthur himself accumulated considerable wealth during his twelve years in office as Lieutenant-Govemor of Van Diemen's Land.

In later life, Jocelyn H C Thomas was a magistrate for a number of years. He returned to England and Wales in the early 1840s, and showed enough interest in potato groing to send out six varieties of seed potatoes to his sons. Tasmania's potato growing soils were then just beginning their 100 years of glory. When he returned to Van Diemen's Land after a two year absence, he must have been surprised at the number of dead or ring-barked trees that ushered in this era in Devon, Tasmania.