Brummie was last surviving convict sent Down Under
Transported to Australia for starting a haystack fire, Sam Speed became ‘reputable citizen’ and lived to 97
SAMUEL Speed, born in Birmingham, has a unique place in one of the darker portals of this country’s history.
Speed was the last surviving convict to be transported from these shores and dumped in Australia.
He was banished from Britain in 1866 and died in 1938 at the grand age of 97.
Speed’s crime?
He set fire to a haystack.
Today that may not even warrant a custodial sentence, but Speed received “seven years of convict transportation to Australia”.
Such savage punishment pitted the lamentable story of our use of Oz as a refuse tip for undesirables. It is a story that has never fully been told.
The very last ship packed with a cargo of convicts – the Hougoumont – docked at Fremantle, Western Australia, on January 9, 1868. Sixty-seven on board were Irish political prisoners.
Since the beginning of transportation in 1788, 168,000 British prisoners had been sent to the distant corner of the Empire. Many did not survive. Many simply could not adapt to the new life and turned to booze.
Brummie Sam Speed was one of the lucky ones.
Very, very little is known about Speed, but there is enough evidence to show he was unfairly treated by the legal system.
Research by Australian think-tank website The Conversation has revealed Speed was born in 1841 and had a brother and sister.
For reasons unknown, Speed turned his back on Britain’s emerging industrial hub and lived a hobo existence, gaining work where he could and often sleeping under the stars.
Hungry and homeless, he hit upon a desperate plan to escape the biting cold of the Oxfordshire farmland where he’d bedded down under hedgerow.
Speed decided to torch a haystack believing the crime would earn him a few days’ shelter in a prison cell. The meals would also be welcome.
The courts decided to send Speed to a place where bitter cold would no longer be a problem, certainly not a problem for the next seven years.
He arrived in Australia, along with 276 other convicts, on The Belgravia on July 4, 1866, after travelling for two months.
Speed was actually conditionally released from an Australian prison in 1869 and found work as a general servant. His “certificate of freedom” arrived two years later.
Speed lived long enough to see his former penal settlement become part of the Federated Commonwealth of Australia.
His release document revealed his next of kin as “sister, Mrs Prey” of Leicester Street, Birmingham.
Prison records show Speed was 20 when transported, which is incorrect, stood 5ft 3ins tall, had dark grey hair, hazel eyes, and had a cataract on his left eye. He was able to read and write.
As a free man, he entered the construction business and helped build bridges across the mighty Swan River which runs through Perth.
There is no record of him reoffending. In fact, the Perth Sunday Times’ report of Speed’s death at the city’s Old Men’s Home said his “conduct was all that a reputable citizen should aspire to”.
His rehabilitation was not the norm.
Eighty per cent of those convicts on the Hougoumont reoffended in their country of incarceration, but none seriously fractured the law.
The crimes included absconding, possession of contraband or violent conduct, or a criminal offence during their time under sentence.
In truth, the wild gold-panners who flooded Western Australia – men who drank and fought hard – posed a much greater threat to law and order.
The Conversation comments: “Speed lived long enough to see his former penal settlement become part of the Federated Commonwealth of Australia. He witnessed the death of an old archaic system, and the birth of a new and confident Australian nation.
“To the early 20th-century press, his life was a gratifying confirmation that the system had worked. Western Australia had taken corrupt British convicts and turned them into productive members of society.
“Given the number of convicts who reoffended both during and after their sentence, it’s better to think of the transportation system as encouraging enough reform for society to progress. The convicts as a cohort may not all have rehabilitated, but few committed serious offences after they were transported.”
It adds: “It is easy to find thousands of ex-convicts who left crime behind and forged new, ordinary, lives in Australia. Yet, while some exconvicts became pillars of their communities, got married, and became much-loved and valued friends and neighbours, others struggled.
“Our ongoing research shows that the impact of transportation could last a lifetime for those in Western Australia. Many convicts were left struggling with unemployment, personal relationships and alcoholism, and drifted through both life and the colony.
“Many reoffended for decades after they were freed in Australia, but only committed low-level nuisance and public order offences – mainly drunkenness and vagrancy – rather than the more serious crimes for which they were initially transported.”