Frederick Britten:
Bathurst mail-coach robbery of 1862
Frederick Britten escaped from Cockatoo Island in September 1863 with Fred Ward (later to become known as the bushranger Captain Thunderbolt). The following prose was written as part of a chapter I had to delete from Captain Thunderbolt and his Lady because of space limitations. It originally preceded Chapter 15.
___________________________
One prisoner who hadn’t joined the January 1863 riots was Bathurst mail-coach robber Frederick Britten, who arrived on Cockatoo Island soon afterwards. Soft voice, smiling countenance: his looks belied his intransigent nature.
Or was his intransigence the desperation of an innocent man fighting for his freedom?
*
Government contractor Arundel Everett could afford to sit inside Cobb’s Bathurst-to-Hartley mail-coach, yet on that bright, moonlit evening he preferred the crisp air to the fug of the cabin. Seven other men were climbing inside, a cramped trip by any standards. He’d sit in the box with the coachman, thank you very much.
Coachman Owen Malone picked up the reins soon after 10 pm on 5 November 1862, the usual time for the mail run. He travelled without a guard despite carrying hundreds of pounds in banknotes en route for Sydney’s banks. Of course, his cargo’s value was paltry compared to the gold, cash and cheques regularly transported by the gold escort from the Lachlan diggings to Bathurst, as Frank Gardiner and his bushranging gang had worked out five months previously. Fourteen thousand pounds was their haul – or would have been if they had succeeded. Guards for all the mail-coaches, however? Not a cost anyone wanted to bear. The banks made a list of all the banknotes being transported, then muttered a heartfelt prayer.
Around 11.30 pm, as the horses’ hooves began to drum on a little bridge a short distance before the Woodside Inn, Malone suddenly tugged on his reins. Something was on the road at the end of the bridge: a pole or poles blocking their way. As he and Everett peered at the obstruction, three masked men climbed up from under the bridge, They brandished revolvers and demanded that the coachman ‘Stand!’, that everyone climb down from the coach.
Arundell Everett objected.
‘I will blow your brains out if you don’t,’ one of the robbers yelled.
Reluctantly Everett stepped down.
‘Sit on the bank with your hands on your head!’
Again Everett refused.
‘Come here,’ the robber ordered, shifting his gun so it pointed directly at Everett’s head.
Warily, Everett approached him, stepping closer and closer. Suddenly, the robber reached out and grabbed his neck-tie. Everett instinctively pulled away and, in the resulting scuffle, his neck-tie slipped off. The robber held it up pointedly and demanded that Everett put his hands behind his back.
‘I’ll see you damned before you tie them,’ said the feisty contracter. ‘If it is money you want, here it is.’ He tossed over his purse.
Seeing the altercation, another robber hurried towards them. Pointing his own gun at Everett’s head, he threatened: ‘I’ll blow your brains out if you don’t submit.’
‘The other man has all my money,’ Everett told the second robber, whose handkerchief covered most of his face. ‘I won’t submit to being tied and what you have to do, you had better do.’
Faced with such defiance, they chose to leave him alone and began searching the other passengers. One man feigned being drunk and claimed he had no money then attempted to flee. Two of the robbers overtook him on the bridge and grabbed him by the neck, squeezing it, threatening to kill him. They only relaxed their grip when Everett ran to the man’s assistance.
Three-quarters of an hour it took the robbers to rifle through the mail bags, tearing open letters and packages, and pocketing the banknotes they found – £500 or so, many years wages for the average worker. All the while, Everett surreptitiously watched the third robber, the man who hadn’t threatened him. The third robber acted as the guard, keeping two guns trained on the passengers while his mates were busy. The man’s handkerchief was tied over his hat and under his chin like the others but covered less of his face. Everett saw enough to be able to identify him at the Sydney watch-house a few weeks later. The man's name, he would later discover, was George Willison.
Another fellow was locked up with Willison, a man named Frederick Britten, but Everett couldn’t positively swear to his identity. ‘If Frederick Britten is the man,’ he would eventually testify at Willison and Britten’s committal hearing, ‘his handkerchief was across his face. I couldn’t see sufficient of his face. However Willison’s face was exposed.’
*
Britten was caught first, after attempting to exchange stolen notes at a Sydney bank two weeks after the robbery. When the 25 year-old labourer was questioned at the police office, he said he’d been working at the Lachlan and had then travelled via Mudgee to Cassilis to visit his brother-in-law, then by coach to Singleton, then train to Newcastle, then steamer to Sydney, arriving the previous Friday. The stolen notes? He must have received them at Cassilis when he sold his dray and horses for £40.
After Sub-Inspector Harrison told him he could go, Britten asked: ‘Can I have my £90 back?’.
‘I will detain the notes until tomorrow,’ said the wily Inspector. ‘Call back in the morning.’
Astonishly, Britten did. When he asked again for his notes, the inspector said that he was still awaiting information, and suggested that Britten return later in the day.
Meanwhile, George Willison’s wife had attempted to purchase goods with some of the stolen notes, claiming they came from her husband. When the police brought both Willisons in for questioning, George mentioned arriving in Sydney on the previous Friday by steamer from Newcastle, and described a strangely circuitous journey from the Lachlan almost identical to Britten’s.
Britten returned to the police office while the Willisons were being interviewed. The inspector asked Britten if he recognised Willison. Britten responded that he didn’t, and Willison said same.
‘Is it not strange that you should both have left Singleton by the same coach and have come to Sydney by the same steamer and yet not know each other?’ Harrison asked.
When they assured him that they didn’t recognise each other, Harrison arrested both of them on the mail-coach robbery charges.
*
Britten was a bolter. He made two attempts to escape from police custody, reaching Brickfield hill (Surrey Hills) on his first opportunistic attempt before the police caught up with him. The second occurred after his committal to stand trial, when he walked from the police van towards the door of Darlinghurst Gaol. Recognising two men on horseback waiting nearby, Britten made a dash for it, but the vigilant police grabbed him and his rescuers galloped away. Britten’s attempts to escape were declared evidence of his guilt at his trial in February 1863.
The prosecutor admitted that the case against Britten was circumstantial, but argued that the evidence was strong. Both Willison and Britten had been found with stolen notes and couldn’t adequately account for their possession. ‘It is a principle of law that if the stolen property were traced to possession of the person immediately after it was stolen, he was taken to be the thief unless he could give a satisfactory account of how it came to be in his hands,’ the prosecutor advised the jury. Moreover, according to Britten and Willison’s own statements, they had come from the Lachlan by the same coach and steamer yet claimed not to recognise each other. ‘It is always a strong circumstance against parties charged with an offence when evidence shows that they were together anywhere within possible reach of the robbery.’
As supporting evidence, the prosecutor called Sergeant Lucas Armstrong who testified that he had seen Britten with Willison on 15 October fishing near Bathurst, and that he had seen Britten again on 12 November on the road near Muswellbrook, and, oh yes, he had also seen Britten with Willison’s wife. Yet the Singleton auctioneer contracted by Willison to sell his goods prior to his trip to Sydney testified that Willison was accompanied by his family and three other men, but that none looked like Britten. Mail-coach driver Owen Malone testified that one of the robbers was somewhat like one of the two men in the dock, although not much, but the other man was not like any of them. As for Arundel Everett: ‘I recognise the dark man in the dock, Willison, as one of the bushrangers. The other man Britten is like one of the bushrangers but I cannot identify him.’
When Britten’s barrister stood up to defend him, he begged the jury to ask themselves why Britten would have taken the notes to a bank, of all places, to be changed and why he would have dogged the policeman’s footsteps in an attempt to get his money back. ‘I cannot conceive any conduct more utterly inexplicable than Britten’s if he was guilty. Nay, I cannot conceive of any conduct to be greater proof of his innocence under the charge made against him.’ Even Britten’s escape attempts couldn’t be considered evidence of his guilt, his barrister assured the jury, as he might have run away through fear of being convicted of a crime he did not commit.
The jury was not swayed. ‘Guilty,’ they announced, for both Willison and Britten.
At the sentencing hearing, Britten defended himself fluently and at length. ‘I have not had a fair trial,’ he declared to the judge. ‘I declare to God that I am wholly innocent of the crime for which I have been convicted.’ He declared that his subpoenaed defence witnesses hadn’t attended the trail, that he couldn’t subpoena others who knew his whereabouts on the day of the crime because he didn’t know their names, that the judge had – without meaning any disrespect – led the jury astray during summing up and that he had tried to correct the judge a few times without success. Also Sub-Inspector Harrison had said to him after his first escape, ‘I took you for a flat, but I’ll take care now that you are identified.’ He beseeched the judge, ‘What wonder is it that I tried to escape when I found I was in such hands.’
‘Flash, talkative rascals,’ one newspaper correspondent would write of the two mail-coach robbers dismissively, and the judge agreed. He responded that the verdict was borne out by the evidence, and sentenced both men to fifteen years labour on the roads, the first year in irons.
Try bolting with irons binding your ankles, was the message Britten received loudly and clearly.
*
The third Bathurst mail-coach robber was still at large, his identity unknown – until Arundel Everett recognised George Blacker who was facing the Sydney courts on other felony charges. At Blacker’s hearings and eventual trial in July 1863, Everett and another two mail-coach passengers identified him. Everett was adamant that Blacker was the robber who pointed the gun to his head and pulled off his tie, recognising both his face and voice, and picking him out of a group of men at the gaol, twice. The other witnesses weren’t as certain and the lack of additional incriminating evidence contributed to the jury’s ‘Not guilty’ verdict.
Significantly, at one of Blacker’s hearings, Everett testified: ‘I do not believe, nor did I ever swear that Britten was one of the three robbers, but I lately saw a man whom I believe to be the third man with Willison and Blacker.’ This "third man" was John Ellis, who was charged around the same time as Blacker but discharged without facing trial when Everett failed to adequately identify him. Everett said that Ellis was the second of the two robbers who had threatened to shoot him but that he was better masked than the others so more difficult to identify.
By this time Arundel Everett had accused four men of complicity in the three-man robbery and was adamant that Britten wasn’t one of the robbers. Even at Britten’s trial, the prosecutor himself admitted that Everett’s identification was problematic, and that the case against Britten was purely circumstantial. But Britten was convicted, nonetheless, and afterwards no one else cared.
*
Was Britten really one of the Bathurst mail-coach robbers or had he simply received the stolen notes in the aftermath? The question lingers, particularly as there were pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that no one noticed at the time. Notably, in March 1863, a month after Britten's incarceration on Cockatoo Island, he had a visitor: John Ellis himself.
Cockatoo Island prisoners rarely had visitors. Indeed, most received no visitors at all for the whole term of their imprisonment. Ellis was evidently a friend or relation of Britten’s, someone close enough or concerned enough to make the effort to visit him. Was Ellis indeed the other masked robber? Perhaps he had passed some of the stolen notes to Britten, and perhaps Britten had chosen to conceal Ellis’ identity when asked to account for his possession. Likely Ellis was one of the horsemen who tried to help Britten escape from the doorway of Darlinghurst Gaol. So was Ellis’ trip to Cockatoo Island an ‘I owe you’ visit, a surreptitious offer to help Britten if he could work out how to escape from the prison.
*
Britten continued to plead his innocence, even when brought before the Central Criminal Court as a witness in another case in April 1863. And he refused to be cowed by his servitude. In July that same year, he and Willison and two others attempted to break out of their ward. A few days later, he and some other men were caught tampering with his irons. For the two infractions, Britten was sentenced to fourteen days in the horror of Cockatoo Island’s solitary confinement cells.
Two months later, on 11 September, Britten was working at one end of a short tramway, probably at the Cockatoo Island quarry where the prisoners continued to hew stone for Sydney’s building projects. Working at the other end of the same tramway on that particular day was another man with a festering anger against the justice system: Fred Ward.
_____________________________
As I researched Frederick Britten, I came across other curious references to the names Frederick Britten and Ellis. These are documented on the page Britten/Ellis jigsaw puzzle. For known information about Britten see his Timeline.
Or was his intransigence the desperation of an innocent man fighting for his freedom?
*
Government contractor Arundel Everett could afford to sit inside Cobb’s Bathurst-to-Hartley mail-coach, yet on that bright, moonlit evening he preferred the crisp air to the fug of the cabin. Seven other men were climbing inside, a cramped trip by any standards. He’d sit in the box with the coachman, thank you very much.
Coachman Owen Malone picked up the reins soon after 10 pm on 5 November 1862, the usual time for the mail run. He travelled without a guard despite carrying hundreds of pounds in banknotes en route for Sydney’s banks. Of course, his cargo’s value was paltry compared to the gold, cash and cheques regularly transported by the gold escort from the Lachlan diggings to Bathurst, as Frank Gardiner and his bushranging gang had worked out five months previously. Fourteen thousand pounds was their haul – or would have been if they had succeeded. Guards for all the mail-coaches, however? Not a cost anyone wanted to bear. The banks made a list of all the banknotes being transported, then muttered a heartfelt prayer.
Around 11.30 pm, as the horses’ hooves began to drum on a little bridge a short distance before the Woodside Inn, Malone suddenly tugged on his reins. Something was on the road at the end of the bridge: a pole or poles blocking their way. As he and Everett peered at the obstruction, three masked men climbed up from under the bridge, They brandished revolvers and demanded that the coachman ‘Stand!’, that everyone climb down from the coach.
Arundell Everett objected.
‘I will blow your brains out if you don’t,’ one of the robbers yelled.
Reluctantly Everett stepped down.
‘Sit on the bank with your hands on your head!’
Again Everett refused.
‘Come here,’ the robber ordered, shifting his gun so it pointed directly at Everett’s head.
Warily, Everett approached him, stepping closer and closer. Suddenly, the robber reached out and grabbed his neck-tie. Everett instinctively pulled away and, in the resulting scuffle, his neck-tie slipped off. The robber held it up pointedly and demanded that Everett put his hands behind his back.
‘I’ll see you damned before you tie them,’ said the feisty contracter. ‘If it is money you want, here it is.’ He tossed over his purse.
Seeing the altercation, another robber hurried towards them. Pointing his own gun at Everett’s head, he threatened: ‘I’ll blow your brains out if you don’t submit.’
‘The other man has all my money,’ Everett told the second robber, whose handkerchief covered most of his face. ‘I won’t submit to being tied and what you have to do, you had better do.’
Faced with such defiance, they chose to leave him alone and began searching the other passengers. One man feigned being drunk and claimed he had no money then attempted to flee. Two of the robbers overtook him on the bridge and grabbed him by the neck, squeezing it, threatening to kill him. They only relaxed their grip when Everett ran to the man’s assistance.
Three-quarters of an hour it took the robbers to rifle through the mail bags, tearing open letters and packages, and pocketing the banknotes they found – £500 or so, many years wages for the average worker. All the while, Everett surreptitiously watched the third robber, the man who hadn’t threatened him. The third robber acted as the guard, keeping two guns trained on the passengers while his mates were busy. The man’s handkerchief was tied over his hat and under his chin like the others but covered less of his face. Everett saw enough to be able to identify him at the Sydney watch-house a few weeks later. The man's name, he would later discover, was George Willison.
Another fellow was locked up with Willison, a man named Frederick Britten, but Everett couldn’t positively swear to his identity. ‘If Frederick Britten is the man,’ he would eventually testify at Willison and Britten’s committal hearing, ‘his handkerchief was across his face. I couldn’t see sufficient of his face. However Willison’s face was exposed.’
*
Britten was caught first, after attempting to exchange stolen notes at a Sydney bank two weeks after the robbery. When the 25 year-old labourer was questioned at the police office, he said he’d been working at the Lachlan and had then travelled via Mudgee to Cassilis to visit his brother-in-law, then by coach to Singleton, then train to Newcastle, then steamer to Sydney, arriving the previous Friday. The stolen notes? He must have received them at Cassilis when he sold his dray and horses for £40.
After Sub-Inspector Harrison told him he could go, Britten asked: ‘Can I have my £90 back?’.
‘I will detain the notes until tomorrow,’ said the wily Inspector. ‘Call back in the morning.’
Astonishly, Britten did. When he asked again for his notes, the inspector said that he was still awaiting information, and suggested that Britten return later in the day.
Meanwhile, George Willison’s wife had attempted to purchase goods with some of the stolen notes, claiming they came from her husband. When the police brought both Willisons in for questioning, George mentioned arriving in Sydney on the previous Friday by steamer from Newcastle, and described a strangely circuitous journey from the Lachlan almost identical to Britten’s.
Britten returned to the police office while the Willisons were being interviewed. The inspector asked Britten if he recognised Willison. Britten responded that he didn’t, and Willison said same.
‘Is it not strange that you should both have left Singleton by the same coach and have come to Sydney by the same steamer and yet not know each other?’ Harrison asked.
When they assured him that they didn’t recognise each other, Harrison arrested both of them on the mail-coach robbery charges.
*
Britten was a bolter. He made two attempts to escape from police custody, reaching Brickfield hill (Surrey Hills) on his first opportunistic attempt before the police caught up with him. The second occurred after his committal to stand trial, when he walked from the police van towards the door of Darlinghurst Gaol. Recognising two men on horseback waiting nearby, Britten made a dash for it, but the vigilant police grabbed him and his rescuers galloped away. Britten’s attempts to escape were declared evidence of his guilt at his trial in February 1863.
The prosecutor admitted that the case against Britten was circumstantial, but argued that the evidence was strong. Both Willison and Britten had been found with stolen notes and couldn’t adequately account for their possession. ‘It is a principle of law that if the stolen property were traced to possession of the person immediately after it was stolen, he was taken to be the thief unless he could give a satisfactory account of how it came to be in his hands,’ the prosecutor advised the jury. Moreover, according to Britten and Willison’s own statements, they had come from the Lachlan by the same coach and steamer yet claimed not to recognise each other. ‘It is always a strong circumstance against parties charged with an offence when evidence shows that they were together anywhere within possible reach of the robbery.’
As supporting evidence, the prosecutor called Sergeant Lucas Armstrong who testified that he had seen Britten with Willison on 15 October fishing near Bathurst, and that he had seen Britten again on 12 November on the road near Muswellbrook, and, oh yes, he had also seen Britten with Willison’s wife. Yet the Singleton auctioneer contracted by Willison to sell his goods prior to his trip to Sydney testified that Willison was accompanied by his family and three other men, but that none looked like Britten. Mail-coach driver Owen Malone testified that one of the robbers was somewhat like one of the two men in the dock, although not much, but the other man was not like any of them. As for Arundel Everett: ‘I recognise the dark man in the dock, Willison, as one of the bushrangers. The other man Britten is like one of the bushrangers but I cannot identify him.’
When Britten’s barrister stood up to defend him, he begged the jury to ask themselves why Britten would have taken the notes to a bank, of all places, to be changed and why he would have dogged the policeman’s footsteps in an attempt to get his money back. ‘I cannot conceive any conduct more utterly inexplicable than Britten’s if he was guilty. Nay, I cannot conceive of any conduct to be greater proof of his innocence under the charge made against him.’ Even Britten’s escape attempts couldn’t be considered evidence of his guilt, his barrister assured the jury, as he might have run away through fear of being convicted of a crime he did not commit.
The jury was not swayed. ‘Guilty,’ they announced, for both Willison and Britten.
At the sentencing hearing, Britten defended himself fluently and at length. ‘I have not had a fair trial,’ he declared to the judge. ‘I declare to God that I am wholly innocent of the crime for which I have been convicted.’ He declared that his subpoenaed defence witnesses hadn’t attended the trail, that he couldn’t subpoena others who knew his whereabouts on the day of the crime because he didn’t know their names, that the judge had – without meaning any disrespect – led the jury astray during summing up and that he had tried to correct the judge a few times without success. Also Sub-Inspector Harrison had said to him after his first escape, ‘I took you for a flat, but I’ll take care now that you are identified.’ He beseeched the judge, ‘What wonder is it that I tried to escape when I found I was in such hands.’
‘Flash, talkative rascals,’ one newspaper correspondent would write of the two mail-coach robbers dismissively, and the judge agreed. He responded that the verdict was borne out by the evidence, and sentenced both men to fifteen years labour on the roads, the first year in irons.
Try bolting with irons binding your ankles, was the message Britten received loudly and clearly.
*
The third Bathurst mail-coach robber was still at large, his identity unknown – until Arundel Everett recognised George Blacker who was facing the Sydney courts on other felony charges. At Blacker’s hearings and eventual trial in July 1863, Everett and another two mail-coach passengers identified him. Everett was adamant that Blacker was the robber who pointed the gun to his head and pulled off his tie, recognising both his face and voice, and picking him out of a group of men at the gaol, twice. The other witnesses weren’t as certain and the lack of additional incriminating evidence contributed to the jury’s ‘Not guilty’ verdict.
Significantly, at one of Blacker’s hearings, Everett testified: ‘I do not believe, nor did I ever swear that Britten was one of the three robbers, but I lately saw a man whom I believe to be the third man with Willison and Blacker.’ This "third man" was John Ellis, who was charged around the same time as Blacker but discharged without facing trial when Everett failed to adequately identify him. Everett said that Ellis was the second of the two robbers who had threatened to shoot him but that he was better masked than the others so more difficult to identify.
By this time Arundel Everett had accused four men of complicity in the three-man robbery and was adamant that Britten wasn’t one of the robbers. Even at Britten’s trial, the prosecutor himself admitted that Everett’s identification was problematic, and that the case against Britten was purely circumstantial. But Britten was convicted, nonetheless, and afterwards no one else cared.
*
Was Britten really one of the Bathurst mail-coach robbers or had he simply received the stolen notes in the aftermath? The question lingers, particularly as there were pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that no one noticed at the time. Notably, in March 1863, a month after Britten's incarceration on Cockatoo Island, he had a visitor: John Ellis himself.
Cockatoo Island prisoners rarely had visitors. Indeed, most received no visitors at all for the whole term of their imprisonment. Ellis was evidently a friend or relation of Britten’s, someone close enough or concerned enough to make the effort to visit him. Was Ellis indeed the other masked robber? Perhaps he had passed some of the stolen notes to Britten, and perhaps Britten had chosen to conceal Ellis’ identity when asked to account for his possession. Likely Ellis was one of the horsemen who tried to help Britten escape from the doorway of Darlinghurst Gaol. So was Ellis’ trip to Cockatoo Island an ‘I owe you’ visit, a surreptitious offer to help Britten if he could work out how to escape from the prison.
*
Britten continued to plead his innocence, even when brought before the Central Criminal Court as a witness in another case in April 1863. And he refused to be cowed by his servitude. In July that same year, he and Willison and two others attempted to break out of their ward. A few days later, he and some other men were caught tampering with his irons. For the two infractions, Britten was sentenced to fourteen days in the horror of Cockatoo Island’s solitary confinement cells.
Two months later, on 11 September, Britten was working at one end of a short tramway, probably at the Cockatoo Island quarry where the prisoners continued to hew stone for Sydney’s building projects. Working at the other end of the same tramway on that particular day was another man with a festering anger against the justice system: Fred Ward.
_____________________________
As I researched Frederick Britten, I came across other curious references to the names Frederick Britten and Ellis. These are documented on the page Britten/Ellis jigsaw puzzle. For known information about Britten see his Timeline.