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Thunderbolt did not go to America!

30/9/2014

The evidence is irrefutable. The myth that Thunderbolt "lived on" – that he wasn't shot in 1870 and instead escaped to North America – has been demolished finally and irrevocably by American researcher, Stephen Ehat. A lawyer and highly respected genealogist, Stephen focused all of his research and analytical skills on the Thunderbolt-in-America/Canada question. The results of his analysis are published in his article Frederick Wordsworth Ward also known as "Captain Thunderbolt" never came to North America (click here).
Thank you Stephen!
Will it silence the Thunderbolt conspiracists? Unfortunately, Irrefutable evidence hasn't succeeded in doing so up to now, so it is unlikely that it will do so in the future. If you want to know why irrefutable evidence does not change the minds of "believers", see my new 'how to' book: HELP! HIstorical and Genealogical Truth: How do I separate fact from fiction?

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Was Fred Ward a rapist?

20/12/2011

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When I went into the ABC studios for my interview with Margaret Throsby on Classic FM, I was told that they had received calls about my book’s “mis-representation” of Fred Ward. One caller stated that Thunderbolt wasn’t a “gentleman bushranger” but instead was a psychopathic murderer and rapist!
     I had heard claims that Fred Ward was a murderer but when I had asked – repeatedly – for evidence, nothing was provided, either then or in the two years since. But a rapist? I’d never heard that one before.
     Soon afterwards, when I was preparing my myth-debunking piece regarding Fred’s alleged employment at Daandine Station, I realised the origin of the rape claim. And I realised that I could easily debunk it.
     On 11 May 1918, the Queenslander (p.41) published an article by William Clark claiming that he knew Fred Ward when he brought cattle from J.P. Wilkie’s property at Daandine to Clark’s father’s property at Brisbane in the early 1850s. Clark then wrote that:

Ward attempted to commit an assault on a married woman. He made his escape, went to Daandine, got a fresh horse, and started duffing fat cattle and selling them to local butchers. He was caught and sentenced to imprisonment on Cockatoo Island.

     I know I keep banging on about the simplest historical detection rule (that is, determine the likely accuracy of unknown information by evaluating the accuracy of known information in the same historical source), but if this “rapist” telephone caller had been paying attention, he wouldn’t have laid such a dreadful charge against Fred’s character.
     As starters, everyone knows that Fred was not convicted and sent to Cockatoo Island for duffing fat cattle in Queensland and selling it to local butchers. That being the case, William Clark’s reliability as a source of accurate information about Fred Ward is immediately open to doubt.
   And what about the rape claim? This can be instantly dismissed. It wasn’t Fred Ward who was working for J.P. Wilkie at Daandine. It was his nephew John Garbutt. Whether Garbutt "committed an assault on a married woman" or whether Clark's memory was inaccurate on this count as well, will probably never be known.

                          See Did Fred Ward’s life of crime start in Queensland?

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Frederick Ward's interrogation

16/12/2011

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Today’s post provides a link to an extremely important historical document: Frederick Ward’s 1857 interrogation which was conducted by a board of inquiry at Cockatoo Island in response to the claims made by his nephew, John Garbutt, regarding Ludwig Leichhardt.
    After pouring over all the original Thunderbolt material, I noticed that Fred had a speech idiosyncrasy. We all have idiosyncratic ways of saying things (for a writer it is part of their authorial voice and it was one of the ways they tracked and ultimately identified the Unibomber), and Fred had a distinctive way of commencing sentences – not always, of course, but often enough to become noticeable. Indeed, I had come to know it so well that when one newspaper article began its description of a robbery by saying that they were not sure if the robber was Thunderbolt or not, I said to myself that if the robber used Fred’s speech idiosyncrasy, I would know it was him. The robber did.
     See if you can identify it. Fred used it three times in his responses to the questions asked at his interrogation.

                   Go to Frederick Ward’s Interrogation on Cockatoo Island.

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Thunderbolt did not go to America!

Was Fred Ward a rapist?

Frederick Ward's interrogation

'Bolt & Bugg Blog

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