Revealed: Kate’s Aussie convict relatives
WHen Prince George arrives in Sydney next Wednesday, diehard republicans will no doubt protest that he is just another over-privileged royal with no more right to reign over them in the future than a kangaroo.
But, as I have discovered, the little fellow has rather more in common with the average Aussie than any of them could suspect. For I can reveal that through a horny-handed, sheep-stealing ancestor, he is related to hundreds, possibly thousands, of modern Australians.
Thanks to his grandmother, Carole Middleton, the eight-month-old Prince can trace his roots to a 19th-century farm labourer from Kent, who was found guilty of stealing three lambs and handed the obligatory sentence — transportation to Australia.
Surely this new-found blood link will help in the Royal Family’s continuing battle against the republican movement, which maintains a powerful voice in the country and wants a head of state who is Australian and who lives in the country.
It will also, perhaps, strengthen the arguments of those who support the idea of Prince William becoming Governor-General of Australia when the incumbent Sir Peter Cosgrove retires in five years.
George’s ties to some of those who will flock to see him next week are the result of a human drama which, in microcosm, tells the story of the forging of Australia itself.
After transportation from Kent, farm labourer Samuel Hickmott started his new life in the young nation, breaking rocks as a member of a chain-gang. It would take ten years to win his freedom.
Hickmott had a son, Henry, who married Sophia Goldsmith, Carole Middleton’s great-great-great aunt.
That name has survived the many decades in between to be borne by the Duchess of Cambridge’s uncle, Gary Goldsmith. (Though he has never been accused of stealing sheep, he attracted a certain infamy when he was exposed as having offered cocaine and prostitutes to a reporter at his Ibizan villa, Maison de Bang Bang.)
Over subsequent years, the Hickmott family’s descendants spread through every state of Australia.
It had been in December 1839 that Samuel and his brother, Thomas, were arrested on the Brighton railway and accused of stealing the three lambs.
The brothers were no better and no worse than many members of t he 19th century underclass, suffering a combination of insufficient work, poor health, undernourishment and the withering effects of the Industrial Revolution. Both had been to jail and the workhouse.
Of course, they were breaking the law, but, for them, it was the only way of feeding their starving families.
SAMuel had four children by two wives, but both women had died. With farm work hard to find, he had twice placed the children in the lamberhurst poor house.
He and his brother Tom served short jail terms for vagrancy, but, in their defence, the pair were the last to be chosen for any work because they were not able to read or write.
When the Hickmott brothers were arrested, they were at the end of their tether. They appeared at Maidstone Assizes on January 2, 1840, and an open-and- shut case was put to the judge.
The brothers had stolen the lambs and the remains of the meat had been found in their houses. The prosecution, determined to get a conviction, produced the lambskins and the evidence of two local butchers. Thomas, of ‘ a notoriously bad character’, was sentenced to be transported for life. His younger brother Samuel was sentenced to ten years’ transportation.
But, effectively, that meant a life sentence — because convicts were not given a return ticket at the end of their sentence and rarely raised enough money to buy one.
So, for the theft of three lambs, the Hickmott brothers were shipped to the other side of the world — Van Diemen’s land, now Tasmania — with no hope of return.
The 101-day journey across the high seas on the prison ship Asia was a living hell, and the brothers stepped ashore with great relief.
But Samuel would spend the next ten years working on a chain-gang, breaking rocks and helping prepare roads on the island, 150 miles from the Australian mainland. There was never any hope of escape.
While little is known of Thomas’s fate, the gruelling punishment did not break Samuel — far from it.
Just over eight years after his conviction, he received a conditional pardon and was subsequently released. In a bullish mood, he sailed to South Australia, where he met up with one of his four sons, Henry. He had been just 15 years old when he had last seen his father.
He’d pledged to meet up with him again and start a new life in the emerging country, and so took his young bride, Sophia Goldsmith, whom he’d met in Kent where her family were the Hickmotts’ neighbours.
even in the fetid steerage cabins, the journey aboard the migrant ship emily, accompanied by its sister-ship named — appropriately, you might say — Kate, was more luxurious by far for the newlyweds than it had been for Hickmott senior.
The couple arrived in Botany Bay on September 9, 1850, and prepared themselves f or an exhausting trip across the vast continent to South Australia.
Sophia Goldsmith was tall, dark and willowy. However, the marriage was not to last beyond its fifth year for, after producing three children, the youngest of whom was to rise to become a Member of Parliament, Sophia died.
The Hickmotts — Samuel; his son Henry; and Henry’s son, Henry edward — steeled themselves for rough times ahead. On his release, Samuel worked as a labourer, while his son Henry sweated it out in the local brickworks at Mount Barker, near Adelaide. The men were hard and they were ambitious.
When the Australian Gold Rush began, all three travelled 300 miles south-west overland from Mount Barker to Clunes, near Melbourne, in the Victorian goldfields where father and son set to work all hours as miners, labourers and brickmakers.
At the age of 72, after years of being toughened on the chain-gang, it is recorded that Samuel was still hard at work, helping build the family fortune — but his had been a supremely tough life and he died soon after.
His son Henry and grandson Henry edward moved to Charlton, in Victoria, where the rewards of their hard labour allowed them to buy a farm and set up a brickmaking business.
EVenTuAlly, Henry edward became a successful building and roads contractor — and the Hickmott family was on its way. Forty years after his grandfather had left england in chains, Henry edward was poised to become the MP for Pingelly.
His mother, Sophia Goldsmith, had died soon after he was born, but her name lived on in his first child, whom he named Sophia.
A portrait survives of this Sophia which, pleasingly for Australians, is strikingly similar to her kinswoman, the Duchess of Cambridge.
So, what of the Goldsmiths who remained in england? The carpenter father of the Sophia who had sailed to Australia hated the shame brought upon the family by his daughter marrying the son of a sheep-stealer.
Sophia’s brother, John, meanwhile, was little more than a labourer and brickmaker for most of his life.
His son, also John, did the same — as did the next generation’s male progeny, Stephen.
For a century, while the Hickmotts slaved away to improve their fortunes in Australia, the Goldsmiths trod water socially and professionally.
Only when Stephen’s son, Ron Goldsmith, broke the mould by becoming an engineer and builder did things begin to l ook up.
Ron’s marriage t o Dorothy Harrison, the decidedly upwardly mobile daughter of a miner from Hetton- l e- Hole, Tyne & Wear, sparked a further move up the social ladder. It was an upward trajectory that’s ended with the extraordinary
achievements of their daughter, Carole Middleton, in producing a daughter who has become mother to the future king of Britain and Australia.
While the Goldsmiths were making their way in the world, Down Under the Hickmott clan had grown fast.
Henry Edward Hickmott — grandson of the convict Samuel — and his wife Elizabeth had 12 children, and it’s the numerous descendants of this couple — and those of his sisters, Eliza and Emma, who make up the nucleus of what may wryly be dubbed ‘ the Australian Royal Family’.
These three siblings — Henry Edward, Eliza and Emma — were Prince George’s first cousins, five times removed.
Though with each generation the cousinage becomes watered down, descendants of these three Hickmotts have a right to claim kinship with the future king.
Today, they range from bluecollar workers through middleclass professionals to such wellknown Australian figures as Brendon Grylls, an MP for Western Australia, and IT multi-millionaire Stanley Lewis.
So, next week — though he won’t know it — Prince George will be among his people, his relatives.
Support for the monarchy Down Under is at a 25-year high, and his presence will surely help the royals’ efforts to nurture the link between themselves and those we can now quite rightly call their Australian cousins. Who knows, one day George might get to meet all those rellies round the barbie.