John & Mary Mills

Archibald Joseph Jeffries married Mary Jane Mills at Portland Head, on the Hawkesbury, in 1852 — the marriage that carries the Jeffries name into the household this history follows, and whose own account is Chapter Two. Mary Jane came from a family that had reached New South Wales by a stranger road than the Layton. Her father, John Mills, was under sentence of transportation for life; her mother, Mary Manning, was born in the colony itself. This companion chapter is theirs.

John Mills was a London upholsterer, tried at the Old Bailey at seventeen for snatching a watch in a Clerkenwell street, and landed — not at Sydney, as the family has long had it, but at Hobart Town, on the ship that first carried convicts direct to Van Diemen’s Land.¹²³ Friends in England reopened his case; within a year of coming up to Sydney he had a conditional pardon, and within a decade he was renting the government ferry across the Nepean and keeping an inn at Penrith — ventures a long drought turned to loss.⁴⁵ He ended his working life thirty years further on as schoolmaster of the Roman Catholic school at Richmond, and died there, respectably, in 1859.¹⁵¹⁷

Son of Richard and Mary

John Mills was born on 7 October 1794 and baptised nine days later at the church of St Botolph without Aldersgate, on the northern edge of the City of London — “John Mills, son of Richard and Mary,” the register kept by the rector William Conybeare.¹ Nothing more of the household is known: not the parents’ marriage, not a trade for Richard, not a brother or sister. Some family trees give him a second surname, Willmott; nothing among the baptism, the trial, the convict papers, the pardon, the marriage or the long file of his colonial correspondence supports it, and it is not used here.

“An Old Thief”

A little after midnight on Monday 18 November 1811, John Mills — seventeen — set on John Abrahams, a butler in Lord Oxford’s service, as he walked home through Jerusalem Passage into Aylesbury Street, Clerkenwell. Mills put a hand under the man’s greatcoat and drew out a silver watch, two gold seals and a gold key; in the struggle that followed he struck Abrahams in the face, twisted out of his own coat and ran off bare-headed. Three watchmen ran him down in Ray Street and found five silk handkerchiefs in his breeches.²

He was tried at the Old Bailey in December 1811, before Mr Baron Graham, on a charge of highway robbery. Eight people gave him a character — an unusual number, and a first sign that he was not friendless. The jury found him “guilty, aged 18 … of stealing from the person, but not with violence,” and he was sentenced to transportation for life. The Middlesex House of Detention register, where he was held for trial, notes his age as eighteen and adds, in the margin, two words: “Old Thief.”²

Landed at the Wrong End of the Colony

The convict transport Indefatigable, John Cross master, did not sail for Sydney. She went to the Derwent, and her prisoners — John Mills among them — were landed at Hobart Town in October 1812.³ He spent about three years in Van Diemen’s Land. Then, on 18 July 1815, the Governor’s office in Sydney wrote to Lieutenant-Governor Davey: the Governor had “received strong recommendations from home in favour of Charles Routley and John Mills, two convicts who came out in the Ship Indefatigable in the Year 1812,” and directed that the two be sent up to Sydney by the return of the colonial brig Emu if they wished to come, or given tickets of leave if they preferred to stay.⁴ Who in England was speaking for him is not known. His companion in that letter, Charles Routley, chose to stay — took a farm at Pitt Water, and ended on the Hobart gallows in 1830, one of Van Diemen’s Land’s most notorious bushrangers.⁴ Mills took the offer of Sydney.

The Store, and the Pardon

Governor Macquarie signed his conditional pardon on 30 August 1816 — the New South Wales register enters him as “Mills John,” ship Indefatigable, of London, an upholsterer, tried at Middlesex Gaol Delivery 4 December 1811, Life.⁵ Advancement did not follow at once: the muster of November 1819 still has him at Sydney as a plain labourer.⁶ But at some point in the next few years he became storekeeper in charge of the commissariat at the government farm at Emu Plains, on the Nepean — a post fixed by the order that ended it, the Deputy Commissary-General directing that James Scott take over “the Commissariat Duties at Emu Plains, in the room of Mr Mills.”⁷ He was moving on to take up the ferry next door.

Mary Manning

Mary Manning was a currency girl, born in the colony in 1802, the daughter of John Manning and his wife Margaret, née Llewellyn — a Sydney building contractor remembered in the family as having built many of the town’s first wharves.¹⁰ By 1821 she and John Mills were keeping house together at Toongabbie, near Parramatta, and on 25 November that year the Rev. Samuel Marsden christened their son William, born the previous July.⁸ A daughter, Mary Jane, followed in 1823.¹⁴

The wedding came after the children. On 12 January 1824, at St Philip’s Church, Sydney, the Rev. William Cowper married them by banns — John Mills, “clerk,” a bachelor, and Mary Manning, a spinster, both “of this parish”; the witnesses were Andrew Ball and an Elizabeth Manning, most likely Mary’s sister.⁹ It was the same church, and the same minister, that would marry Ruth Jeffries — Archibald’s sister — nineteen years later.

The Ferry, the Inn, and Three Hundred Acres

Mills rented the Emu ferry — the crossing that carried the western road over the Nepean — at £130 a year. Ten days after his wedding he wrote to the Colonial Secretary, Frederick Goulburn, asking for the paddock behind the ferry hut to hold the travelling stock, at a Spanish dollar the acre; it was granted in February, on condition he not put it under crop, and a government man, Mark Kingston, was assigned to him at the ferry that March.¹¹

The season then turned against him. A long drought let the public ford the river and go round the ferry altogether; Mills asked to fence a few acres of riverbank to make good the loss, was refused, and was offered instead a reduction in the ferry rent. By the start of 1825 he had also taken an inn on the western road at Penrith, “under a great rent,” and petitioned Governor Brisbane to buy about three hundred acres nearby — bounded by John McHenry’s estate, the Great Western Road, land held by Captain Phillip Parker King, R.N., and the new road being cut through to Richmond — meaning to build an inn on it. Goulburn referred the purchase to the Surveyor-General; a second assigned man, William Wire, was moved out of Captain King’s service and into Mills’s, and three more followed that June.¹²

None of it paid. In two memorials to Brisbane in 1825, Mills set down the account: £130 rent, £60 lost to the drought besides the ferrymen’s wages, a reduction twice promised and never given — and then a demand for the whole £130 with £8 costs, which he raised only

Whether the promised reduction ever came, or the three hundred acres, is not known.¹³ He gave up the ferry not long after.

The Schoolmaster

For two decades the record thins. A grand-daughter, writing in 1922, remembered that he “conducted schools in several places, notably at Parramatta,” and that “his last school was at Kurrajong.”¹⁰ The one contemporary record so far is a colony-wide school return laid before the Legislative Council about 1850, which lists him among the Roman Catholic schools of the District of Windsor — Richmond, thirteen boys and thirty girls, the school costing the government £52 10s. a year — alongside a second Roman Catholic school at North Richmond under Thomas Hyland, both belonging to the Windsor mission under Dean John Coffey.¹⁵ The Millses were not themselves Catholic: John was buried from the Anglican church, and in 1857 was the book depositary of the Windsor branch of the Bible Society, thanked in its annual report as a townsman “one more suitable it would be hard to find.”¹⁵

The North Richmond house has its own small place in this family’s wider story. It was “at the residence of Mr. John Mills, North Richmond” that Ruth Hunt — a granddaughter of Samuel Jeffries, and a niece of Archibald’s — died of scarlet fever in July 1855. A Jeffries grandchild dying in a Mills house three years after Archibald married Mary Jane Mills is one sign the two households were already close before the marriage joined them; the point is argued in the companion chapter, The Jeffries Emigrants.¹⁶

Schoolmaster, Aged Sixty-Four

John Mills died at North Richmond on 4 February 1859, aged sixty-four. The Sydney Morning Herald gave him a single line — “at his residence, North Richmond, Mr. John Mills, schoolmaster, aged sixty-four years” — the trade, not the sentence, being what was remembered.¹⁷ He was buried in the churchyard of St Peter’s, the Anglican church at Richmond. His headstone there also carries the name of an infant Matilda Mills, “daughter of the above,” who died on 30 November 1859, eight weeks old — born, on the stone’s own reckoning, some eight months after John himself was dead, which is not yet explained.¹⁷

Mary Mills lived on among her children and died on 3 May 1879 at her son’s house at Balmain, aged seventy-seven, “of decay of age.” Her death notice counted the family the marriage had made: “leaving 10 children, 84 grandchildren, and 34 great-grandchildren.”¹⁷ Their eldest daughter, Mary Jane, had by then been dead fifteen years — she died at Bathurst on 6 February 1894, aged seventy, having married into the Jeffries family and raised the children whose story continues in Chapter Two.¹⁸

Questions not yet resolved

The conduct record. John Mills’s Van Diemen’s Land conduct record, CON31/1/29, has not yet been located within its bound volume of some 366 images — the register runs by first letter of surname and then by ship, not by name, so a name search does not find it. It should show his behaviour in the colony and how his removal to Sydney came about.

The recommendations from home. Who in England took up John Mills’s case in 1815, and why, is not known — nor whether it connects to the eight character witnesses at his trial.

The Emu Plains appointment. When he became commissariat storekeeper, and whether he ever gave evidence before the Judge-Advocate Ellis Bent, as one family account has it, is unconfirmed.

The ferry and the three hundred acres. Whether Governor Brisbane ever granted the rent reduction he twice promised, and whether the Evan district land was ever bought or the inn built, is not known.

Mary Manning’s people. John Manning and Margaret Llewellyn — free, convict or colony-born, and married when and where — are not yet traced.

The number of children. Twelve are registered, an elder William of 1821 seems to have died young, and a grand-daughter’s 1922 recollection puts the family at fifteen — which would mean two or three more, dying before civil registration and leaving no other trace.

The infant Matilda of 1859. Whether she was a late child of Mary’s, at fifty-seven, or a grandchild buried in the family plot, is not resolved.

The Children of John and Mary Mills

Twelve children are registered to John Mills and Mary Manning between 1823 and 1844. An elder son, William, was christened at Toongabbie in 1821, before his parents’ marriage, and seems to have died young, since a second William was registered in 1839. Family tradition put the whole family at fifteen. Mary Jane’s life, and her marriage into the Jeffries family, is told in Chapter Two.