Robert McIntosh & Eleanor Dudgeon

Robert McIntosh was born on 30 January 1781 and baptised five days later at Glenalbert, a farm on the banks of the Tay in the parish of Logierait, Perthshire.¹ His parents, John McIntosh and Isobel McIntosh, had married in 1773 at Little Dunkeld, and the family was already established at Glenalbert by 1779, when Robert’s elder sister Grizel was baptised there.² The line runs back a further two generations in the same small stretch of country — John’s own father was William McIntosh, and beyond him a Donald McIntosh, married in Logierait in 1707.

Logierait itself was a small place with an outsized history: seat of the Atholl family’s regality court, with its own courthouse and prison, once holding six hundred government prisoners after the 1745 battle of Prestonpans. By the time Robert was growing up, the district’s economy was turning from linen to whisky. What he did between his baptism and 1807 — when he next appears, marrying in Dublin — has left no record yet.

A musician marries

Robert married Helen — also recorded as Eleanor — Dudgeon in Dublin. The Dublin marriage-bond index gives 4 July 1807; the certificate later produced in a Sydney courtroom gives 8 July — the two sources have never quite agreed. What both agree on is his stated occupation: musician.³ How long he had been in Ireland, or what took him there from a Perthshire farm, is not yet known.

The Windham

Robert arrived in Sydney on 11 February 1814, with the regiment’s headquarters, aboard the Windham (also spelled Wyndham). Ellen and their three small children — Elizabeth, Robert and John, the oldest not yet six — travelled with him.

Bandmaster to a young colony

For the three and a half years Robert led it, the band of the 46th was woven into almost everything Sydney did to mark an occasion. It played at Lieutenant-Colonel Molle’s swearing-in dinner within weeks of Robert’s arrival; at the King’s Birthday celebrations in 1815; struck up "God save the King!", "Rule Britannia!" and "Hearts of Oak!" at the launch of the government brig Elizabeth Henrietta in 1816; and led the flotilla of decorated barges to Captain Piper’s fête at Elizabeth Point that November. It wasn’t only the grand set-pieces, either — notices from December 1816 and January 1817 show the band had a standing weekly engagement playing for the Sunday evening promenades in Hyde Park, "as usual." For a colony still working out what a "proper" civil society was supposed to sound like, Robert’s band was, for those years, more or less the answer.⁴

Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s whole program for the colony — churches, roads, public buildings, an orderly town laid out on a grid — was as much about respectability as bricks and mortar, and music was part of that project. His dinners, levees and public ceremonies leaned on the regimental band to supply exactly the note of order and occasion he was after; Elizabeth Macquarie, who took her own close interest in how the colony presented itself, would have heard Robert’s band at most of the same events her husband did. It is Macquarie’s own signature that approved Robert’s Pittwater land grant in 1817, his transportation order in 1820, and his early release in 1821 — the Governor is a recurring presence across the whole of Robert’s colonial life, not only its musical opening.

Some of that work was churchgoing rather than ceremonial. On 16 August 1817, not long before his discharge, Robert was paid £8 10s from the Police Fund for a full year of the band "performing Church Music" — regular duty at Sydney’s services, almost certainly at St Philip’s, the colony’s principal church of the period and the one most closely tied to Macquarie’s own patronage.

The regiment left for Madras in September 1817. Robert didn’t go with it. He was formally discharged on 7 September — the day the regiment departed — and stayed in the colony.

Constable, publican, teacher, farmer

Three weeks after his discharge, on 1 October 1817, Robert was granted 200 acres at Pittwater — one name on a list of free settlers personally signed off by Governor Macquarie. Over the next two years he built up several livelihoods at once. Chief among them: within months of leaving the army, he advertised in the Sydney Gazette as a music teacher, working from his own house — "TO THE GENTRY OF THE COLONY, AND THE PUBLIC AT LARGE… Robert McIntosh respectfully begs to inform, that he has commenced teaching Music at his House in York-street." He taught piano forte at half a crown a lesson, and violin, clarionet and hautboy (oboe) at two shillings — the same spread of strings, keyboard and woodwind a regimental bandmaster would have had to know inside out — and offered to tune instruments and supply music for balls and private entertainments besides. A spirit licence followed, for a public house called the Chequers, on York Street, first applied for in 1818; so did a small government meat-supply contract.

On 5 June 1819 he was appointed Constable for the districts of Pitt Water and North Harbour. Around the same time he received a cow from the Government Herd on a three-year credit bond, to be repaid in kind. In the space of eighteen months since leaving the army, Robert had built himself a farm, a pub, a music-teaching practice, a government cattle bond and a formal civic appointment.

The King’s Stores

Then, on 20 June 1820, Robert was convicted at the Court of Criminal Jurisdiction of stealing goods from His Majesty’s Stores — the property of the King. He was sentenced to four years’ transportation to Newcastle. Two other men, Alexander Campbell and William Whitfield, were tried alongside him on a charge of receiving the same goods; both were acquitted.

There is a fuller story behind the bare conviction. A year and a half later, in December 1821, a millwright named Charles Milner wrote a long letter of complaint about mismanagement of government stores near the Sydney wharf. He had tipped off an official, he said, about wrongdoing there, on condition it be kept quiet a little longer — but the tip leaked, and the matter was forced into the open before it was, in Milner’s words, "ripe." The result, he wrote, was that "Mr Mackentotch" — who had "the care of the Stores" and was a free man, a former regimental bandmaster — was tried and sentenced to four years’ transportation, while Milner himself was left out of pocket, never even paid his witness fees. Whether or not Milner’s account is entirely fair to Robert, it suggests the theft charge sat inside a larger, unresolved dispute over the stores — and that Robert, in a position of trust, ended up carrying the consequences more or less alone.⁵

Transportation and an early return

Robert was transported to Newcastle on the brig Princess Charlotte, arriving in late July 1820, under an order approved personally by Governor Macquarie. Newcastle at this time was the colony’s main secondary-punishment station — a brick barracks built to hold eight hundred men, its convicts set to coal mining, cedar-cutting and lime-burning under a curfew and a total ban on spirits, commanded throughout Robert’s time there by Major James Morisset.

He didn’t serve the full four years. On 9 August 1821 the Colonial Secretary wrote to Morisset with an order from Governor Macquarie: Robert and another prisoner, James Williams, were to return to Sydney and serve out the rest of their sentences there, "in Consideration of their having Wives and large Families." He sailed back on the colonial cutter Mermaid — thirteen months after his conviction. He wasn’t fully free yet, though. On 8 September he was formally assigned as a convict servant to his own wife, a common device for keeping a convicted man attached to his household rather than government labour, and on 1 April 1822 he petitioned the Colonial Secretary for a General Pass, naming Captain John Piper as a character reference and describing himself, plainly, as "beginning the world."

Rebuilding

He kept building through these years regardless. In January 1822 he leased out a dwelling house on George Street — known as the Bull’s Head — to a publican, Miles Fieldgate, for five years at £50 a year; the two men had known each other in the licensed trade since at least 1818. Through 1822 he received a second cow from the Government Herd, still recorded under his old title, "Mr of Band." By January 1824 he was farming at Pittwater in earnest, petitioning for a further piece of land adjoining his own — bounded by Pitt Water, a stream called Cowan, and rocks and scrub — describing a herd of forty cattle, branded "RM" on the near hip. The Governor approved it in March, sanctioning his occupation of 400 acres around his stock yard.

The "old woman" was Margaret "Peggy" McKinnon, a First Fleet convict widowed from Pittwater’s early settler Philip Schaffer. Lang’s account, published independently of anything the family ever wrote about itself, is a small window onto the kind of man Robert was in his last years — willing to take on the support of an impoverished elderly widow in exchange for land, and dead within about a year of the bargain.

Two deaths

Eleanor died on 30 August 1826, aged 38. Not long after, Robert married again — to a woman recorded as Elizabeth, a former convict who had arrived either per the Stirling in 1803 or the Gatton in 1807, the sources disagree and neither has been checked against a primary record. She outlived him and later remarried, to a man named Hugh McLean.

Robert died on 3 November 1829, aged 48. The sources disagree even on where — an 1844 court notice gives Clarence Street, Sydney; the citation calling in his next of kin, issued that December, describes him as "late of Parramatta." His tombstone, in Sydney’s old "Sand-hills" burial ground, records that he left eight children. Letters of administration for his estate were granted, uncontested at the time, to his eldest surviving son, also named Robert.

Nine years in court

Robert’s death didn’t settle things quietly for long. On 20 September 1842 — thirteen years after he died — five of his children (John, James, Mary, Charles and Ellen) filed an equity suit against their brother Robert junior, their sister Sarah, and their father’s widow Elizabeth, by then remarried as Elizabeth McLean. The dispute centred on the George Street property their father had been leasing out back in 1822.

The case dragged on for years, through a procedural tangle in 1843 — not helped by Sarah, one of the plaintiffs and still a minor and ward of the court, marrying William Pymble without the court’s permission partway through — a formal call for next-of-kin claims in 1844, a renewal of that same call in 1847, and a creditors’ notice in 1848.

It finally reached a jury trial in June 1851 — The Queen v. McIntosh — nearly twenty-two years after Robert senior’s death. The real question at the heart of it was whether Robert junior was truly his biological son and heir, or whether — as James argued — he was actually Eleanor’s son from before her 1807 marriage, making him no true heir at all. Witnesses disagreed wildly on Robert junior’s age when the family arrived in the colony in 1814, some putting him as young as five or six, others as old as eleven or twelve. The defence produced the 1807 marriage certificate and argued he must simply have been born within it; there was also strong testimony about family resemblance, and the jury was brought in specifically to look at James, Robert junior, Mary and John side by side. In the end, the jury found Robert junior was indeed the rightful heir — but also found the original 1829 Crown grant had been obtained on a misrepresentation, without necessarily meaning fraud.

Echoes

The same George Street property was still unsettled two generations later. In Coote v. McIntosh, a one-tenth share of what had by then become the Royal Arcade properties on George Street was disputed in the Supreme Court, in Equity — this time between an outside purchaser, Edward Coote, and Herbert Edgar McIntosh, who represented the interests of Robert senior’s own grandchildren and great-grandchildren, not yet traced to a specific line. The court moved toward partitioning the property between the parties rather than an outright sale. Almost a century after Robert first leased that same house to Miles Fieldgate, his descendants were still arguing over it.