Here Kitty, Kitty

Back in 2010, when I published my book Paul Bushell, Second Fleeter, a shiny new idea for another book popped into my head. That was to write about Paul's first wife Jane Sharp's experiences on the store ship Kitty.

Sailing Ship Kitty, 235 tons, in the Mersey off Liverpool, 1808,
Oil Painting by Robert Salmon

It had arrived in Sydney from London on 18 November 1792, carrying not only essential stores and the badly-needed supply of Spanish dollars for a coin-starved colony but also twenty-seven convict women (about half being Irish) and two convict men. Three women had died en route and three more died within a year of reaching Sydney. It’s another ‘floating brothel’ story, as eight children were fathered by men aboard this vessel during the voyage from England to Sydney. 

In 2010 I began collecting material. I researched the passengers, captain and crew on that ship. The journey. The fate of the women in Australia. I emailed a number of other people whose contact details I could find online. Seven in fact. 

• Five were very helpful with their responses.  
• One said ‘Little is known about XXX and what there is was researched by YYY and which is only available to proven descendants’. 
• Another said ‘Sorry I don’t share family information regarding our research for other researchers to put into books etc. Especially since the cost of certificates and the such are prohibitive. We are (the family) doing our own book’. 

Hmmm. I'm glad all those lovely people who helped me with my Bushell book did not have that attitude. 

From my notes I structured a book draft, 111 pages long. But the book about the Kitty did not have a high priority. Other books were ahead in my personal queue and three of those stories have since been published. Meanwhile, someone else has published a book covering the voyage of the Kitty. Unhappy Exiles: Convicts of the Pitt & Kitty 1792, by Marion Starr. I hasten to say she was not one of the people mentioned above. 

Just as the male convicts during their long months at sea aboard transport vessels sometimes ‘bonded’ or made ‘enemies’, so did the women. I'd already worked out many new angles on three or four of the Kitty women through the links between two couples, Paul Bushell and his wife Jane Sharp and Robert Forrester and his wife Isabella (Bella) Ramsay (who was not a Kitty passenger). Among the low number of women living at the Hawkesbury before 1800, Jane and Bella were part of a female friendship group among the Kitty transportees. 

The Forresters moved to the Hawkesbury in 1794 and Robert’s former colleague on the night watch, Paul Bushell, moved there around 1798. Paul had recently married Jane Sharp, who was much the same age as Bella. Despite her life sentence, Jane was obviously a model prisoner and she was recommended by Captain Collins for a conditional pardon before he departed the colony in September 1796. Already at the Hawkesbury from around 1795 was another Kitty shipmate of Jane’s, Elizabeth Chambers, the wife of the Forrester’s neighbour Private Henry Lamb. This set the scene for all three pioneering English women, Jane, Elizabeth and Bella, to help each other at the frontier of settlement. Childless Jane later raised Bella’s youngest child.

Soon Irish convict Sarah Dailey, who also bore a daughter by a man on the Kitty, was living on Wilberforce Reach with William Douglas. Another shipmate, Elizabeth Clough, lived at Richmond with James Nugent.

By 1803 another member of the Kitty cohort of women, and a particular friend of Jane Sharp, was living close to the Forresters. This was Charlotte Stroud, caring for her daughter fathered by the Kitty’s captain. She’d created a new family with Sergeant George Loder, the assistant store keeper at Windsor. Robert already knew Loder well, as they’d been on Norfolk Island together. The ship returning them both to Sydney in March 1793 was the Kitty! 

My draft of a book about the Kitty has been scrapped. But references to the Kitty will make frequent appearances in my forthcoming book Sentenced to Debt: Robert Forrester, First Fleeter. 

P.S. You are invited to follow Louise Wilson, Author on Instagram.

Ebenezer Church Plaque

Ebenezer Church, constructed in 1809, is the oldest church of any denomination still used for public worship in Australia. (See the church website.) For many years the names of its founders, one of whom was Paul Bushell, have been commemorated on a wall plaque in the entrance porch of the church. (See pages 277 & 278 of my book Paul Bushell, Second Fleeter.)

That original plaque named Paul Bushell's wife as Elizabeth Brown, an incorrect reference to his second wife, Isabella Brown, who he married in 1822. Paul Bushell's wife in 1809 was actually Jane Sharp, who died in 1820.

The original plaque also omitted William Jacklin's first wife Mary Cardell. Jacklin married his second wife Elizabeth Connell in 1811.

An updated version of the plaque was unveiled on 18 June 2011 and at last I was able to view it for myself when I visited Ebenezer last week. The wording on the new plaque left me wondering. Was it primarily designed to tell us that Bushell and Jacklin married twice, unlike the other men? At least one of these second wives was not a founder of the church. I don't have the details for Elizabeth Connell's possible role, but Isabella Brown was about eight years old when the church was constructed in 1809. It just goes to show how much thought and background sleuthing is required for even the simplest of well-intentioned tributes to our forebears.

Ebenezer Church and the 'Kitty'

The Ebenezer Church Newsletter No 13, October 2012, contains my article headed 'Paul Bushell, Jane Sharp and the Kitty Connection', which follows:

Although they had both arrived as convicts, Paul Bushell and his first wife Jane Sharp are recognized as members of the group which founded the Ebenezer church. Their connection with Ebenezer was rather intriguing.
It began in 1792 aboard the ship Kitty. Three months after the Kitty arrived in Sydney with its load of stores and about 30 mostly-female convicts, a baby fathered by the ship’s captain, George Ramsay, was born to Charlotte Stroud, one of the convicts in his charge. The baby was named Jane, possibly in honour of Charlotte’s fellow transportee, 17-year-old Jane Sharp, who may have helped care for Charlotte’s other two children during the long sea voyage. Later in the 1790s Jane Sharp formed a permanent relationship with Paul Bushell and Charlotte Stroud teemed up with the private soldier George Loder, based at Windsor. Charlotte’s small daughter, who became known as Jane Loder, and two other children fathered by men aboard Kitty lived near the Bushells, and Jane Sharp remained friendly with their mothers.
Paul’s life in Australia was exemplary, yet for many years after his arrival in Sydney with the Second Fleet in 1790 he avoided the religion presented by Rev Richard Johnson (from 1788 to 1800) and Rev Samuel Marsden (from 1794). Things changed, and Paul’s need for acceptance and fellowship was satisfied, with the advent of Rev Rowland Hassall as a preacher at Ebenezer. Hassall, an age peer of Paul’s, from the English Midlands like Paul, and sharing Paul’s interest in horse-breeding, helped the ‘Coromandel Settlers’ group of Calvinistic Methodists and Presbyterians build the chapel and school at Ebenezer. Paul and Jane mixed with this group from at least April 1808. Hassall continued to preach at Ebenezer until Rev John Youl was appointed in 1809. Youl was an Anglican at this time, but was later involved with the Congregational Church.
Documentary proof does not survive, but Paul Bushell married Jane Sharp some time between August 1806 and April 1810, and it’s more than likely that they were married at Ebenezer by Hassall or Youl, either under the ‘great spreading tree’ or in the new church. Early in 1810 Rev Youl married Jane Sharp’s young namesake from the Kitty, Jane Stroud/Ramsay/Loder, who had come into regular contact with Youl when he was teaching at Windsor from 1808. Through the Kitty connection, the Youls were most likely personal friends of the Bushells.
When William Pascoe Crook became a full-time evangelist in 1814, his wide-ranging circuit included the church at Ebenezer, and on one of these trips he visited the home of Paul Bushell, and the school at Wilberforce which Paul had helped James Kenny establish around 1807. Crook’s diary implies that this was his first meeting with Paul Bushell, and Crook completely ignored Mrs Bushell’s presence in her own home. Both being ex-convicts, the Bushells did not receive the deference shown by Crook to Mrs Youl a few days later. The irony of the long-standing connection between the Bushells and the Youls was clearly lost on Crook.
Evangelists of the ‘fire and brimstone’ variety, like Crook, may not have appealed to the Bushells but they continued to enjoy the ongoing, genuine Christian fellowship of their friends at Ebenezer. Although the Bushells lived at Wilberforce, some distance from the church, in March 1817 Paul pledged an annual contribution of ₤2.10.0 towards the support of the Minister at Ebenezer, the other thirteen supporters each pledging ₤5 annually.
Religious affiliations at this time were very fluid. By 1820, as the church at Ebenezer drifted closer to Presbyterianism, Paul turned back towards the Church of England, into which faith he’d been baptized in 1766. The attraction may have been the new chaplain working at Windsor from December 1819, Rev John Cross, a recent immigrant holding broad and liberal views. Cross had taken over from Rev Robert Cartwright, who tended to be very critical of ex-convicts and disinclined to think of them as respectable or moral. Rev Cross buried Jane Bushell née Sharp at Wilberforce in December 1820 and married Paul to his young second wife Isabella Brown at St Matthew’s Windsor in June 1822. Once Cross moved on from Windsor in the late 1820s, Paul became a regular member of the Church of England congregation in the schoolroom at Wilberforce, his wife Isabella’s home parish.

For more information, see my book ‘Paul Bushell, Second Fleeter’. Copies are available at the Ebenezer Church bookshop, or online via BookPOD
Contact Ted Brill via the website www.ebenezerchurch.org.au to join the emailing list for the Ebenezer Church Newsletter.