Travels with my ancestors #25: The Rags to Riches Tale of the Roberts Family

How did an illiterate horse thief from Warwickshire survive the worst transport ship in the history of convict voyages to Australia, then go on to become the Governor’s ‘go-to man’ for road and infrastructure projects in early Sydney? How did he transform himself from a wretched convict into a wealthy land owner, hotelier, husband and father?

The answer surely includes some good luck. Also, a finely tuned instinct for preservation, dogged hard work, and an ability to grasp the opportunities that the transportation system offered – if you could first survive the cruelties of the British justice system at the time.

William Roberts was my 4 x great-grandfather and his epic story illustrates how someone with physical and mental strength, with a generous dollop of luck, could do that.

His wife, Jane Longhurst, had an equally intruiging tale. I have written an earlier post about Jane and how she and William connected after both were transported; you can read it here.

WILLIAM ROBERTS (Abt. 1754 – 1819)
and
JANE LONGHURST / LONGEST (1783 – 1836)

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Part One: Surviving

26 March 1787, Warwickshire, England

When William Roberts reluctantly entered the courtroom of the Warwick Assizes in early spring 1787, it was likely the most modern building he’d ever been inside. The dark wood of the public benches, and the prisoner dock where he stood, shone from regular polishing. Completed eleven years earlier, the courtrooms in the Warwick Shire Hall commanded solemnity, silence and—for the accused—enormous stress.

All eyes were on the Judge’s bench with its red leather seat and curtains, which would be drawn around the bench when a death sentence was pronounced. On a hook next to the bench hung the black cap the Judge would don at that moment. Surely, William would not receive the worst possible penalty for his crime of horse theft?

Mr Justice Heath heard sixty cases before pronouncing all verdicts together, at the end.[i] They were dealt with quickly, on average no more than ten minutes per matter, the sharp sound of the gavel punctuating the conclusion of one and the beginning of the next. William was not the only one facing a charge of horse stealing; there were two others like him, and men and women variously accused of theft of sheep, burglary, house breaking and robbery. Twenty-four times the guilty verdict was pronounced, the curtains drawn and the black cap positioned on top of His Honour’s head. Twenty-four lives to be ended at the gallows.

Most had no money to employ someone to put their case before the Court, had that even been allowed. They now had to hope for mercy from His Majesty King George III.

Thankfully that mercy arrived quickly. Just five days later, William and the other condemned were told that their sentences had been commuted to Transportation to the Eastern Coast of New South Wales, or some one of the islands adjacent, for seven years.[ii]

But what, exactly, did that mean? And where in the world was New South Wales?

~

If he could have looked at a map, he’d have been amazed and horrified at the vast expanse of ocean that lay between his prison in the midlands of England and the new British colony of New South Wales. He’d been raised in the landlocked county of Warwickshire, where the River Leam ambled its way north of the village of Leamington Hastings, his likely birthplace in 1754.[iii] He’d had nothing to prepare him for a voyage across the seas.

There’d been Roberts in villages and towns to the south and east of the city of Birmingham for many years.[iv] Most probably worked as agricultural labourers on the farms spread around that part of the county. Life was basic at best, beggared at worst, precarious always. The grand manor house that centuries ago had been home to the local lords, the Hastang family, were not for the likes of the Roberts. They made do from whatever labour or trades they could, settling in places called Arrow, Alcester, Salford Priors, along with William’s own village where he’d been raised with his older sister Elizabeth and younger brother Thomas.[v]

William had been baptised privately, then brought into the church some days later to have the baptism confirmed in front of the congregation.^[vi]This often happened when those present at a birth thought that the baby might not survive until a church baptism could be held. In the case of this baby, he proved to be a survivor—several times over.

When he was nine, he’d witnessed his parent’s grief as they buried their baby boy Job, dead within a month of birth. Not a survivor, sadly for the Roberts family. Thomas and Ann had tried again for another boy, born seven months later. He too was baptised Job. They buried that tiny body weeks later.[vii]

There were no more children.

~

In his thirties William was working, possibly on an estate known as ‘Wootton Park,’ about twenty kilometres west of Leamington Hastings. Built a century earlier, it had a manor hall, workers’ accommodation and landscaped grounds set amidst fertile green farmland.[viii] Workers kept the manor house in good repair and tended the expansive landscaped gardens. Given the nature of the terrible mistake he was about to make, it’s very possible that he worked in the stables, feeding, watering, and grooming the horses of the estate owners.

His employment at ‘Wootton Hall’ may have provided him with lodgings as well as wages: a real boon as labouring or unskilled work barely brought in enough to cover weekly expenses like lodging and food.

Wootton Hall, Wooton Wawen, Warwickshire UK. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wootton_Wawen_Wootton_Hall_002.JPG

What he did next would turn all that upside down.

He stole a horse, a gelding, probably from the estate—a risky business, stealing from your employer, if that’s what he did. If he enjoyed whatever time he had with the horse, crouching over its mane as it galloped away from Wootton, he would soon regret it. Whether he took the valuable animal to sell, to keep, or to trade, his plan came to a crashing halt when he was arrested and sent to a gaol, probably in Warwick, to await his trial.

After the sentencing, he was transferred in October to the prison hulk Stanislaus on the Thames in London.[ix] Here he was in the company of several other fellows who, like him, had escaped the death penalty at the Warwick Courthouse: Thomas Hughes, James Anderson, Richard Frinchett, James Royal Loome. Their hearts sank as they were rowed out to the decommissioned naval ship moored at Woolwich and clambered the rope up its dripping, rotting side. The old ship looked like a dark, monstrous, crouching thing on the water.

Below, each deck was divided lengthways by metal bars, behind which they were crammed in close together. The smells from disease, unwashed bodies and clothes, and stale air were overwhelming. The other prisoners were thin, despairing, sickly men, many in rags and without shoes. There were some hard-faced veterans of the hulks, but also lads of nine or ten.

Life on the hulks was barely a life. He needed every ounce of courage and strength to face each day.

Their rations were poor: mouldy bread, hard ship’s biscuit, some thin soup with a small portion of cheap meat to be divided among each mess of six or more men. They drank weak beer or water from the filthy Thames.[x]

Each morning they were taken off to labour in work teams: digging moats or building embankments, dredging the thick river mud, construction work on docks, breaking up rocks. Each evening they were returned to the hulk to eat and sleep. The next day, and the next, and all the following days repeated the same pattern. Along with the hard labour, they had to avoid fights between prisoners, obey orders barked at them by guards, stay out of trouble, and hope not to succumb to illness—the only thing that flourished on board.

The hulks were the authorities’ solution to the developing problem of overcrowding in prisons across the land. Monied people had pressured the Government to address an alarming increase in property crimes: theft, burglary, poaching, highway robbery. Soon such offences were on an ever-expanding list of crimes for which death, or a long prison term, were the usual sentences. For some time, miscreants had been sent away to the American colonies.  Wealthy folks were happy with this ‘out of sight, out of mind’ solution.

In 1775 that all changed. The Revolutionary War in America stopped the easy transfer of Britain’s law breakers. Unsuitable old gaols were groaning under the strain of more men, women and children pushed through their gates. At the same time, there was growing distaste and unease about the number of offences for which people could be hanged, resulting in more death penalties commuted, more prisoners needing to be incarcerated long term. What was to be done?

The hulks provided a solution—of sorts.

After the First Fleet of ships set off for the new colony of New South Wales in 1787, it seemed that the problem of crowded gaols would be solved by resuming the system of transportation. In the meantime, those waiting to be sent away had to be put somewhere. 

Six months after arriving on the Stanislaus, William and his fellow Warwickshire prisoner, Thomas Hughes, were sent south to the harbour at Portsmouth, where yet another prison ship awaited them.[xi] The conditions on the Lion proved no better. They were kept here for twenty long months.

Was William told the news that he would, finally, be transferred to a ship that would sail to New South Wales? Or simply bundled onto a rowboat and sent across to clamber up the side of the new vessel? Either way, he would have felt relief to have the hulk at his back at last. Whatever lay ahead in that mysterious place, New South Wales, at least on the voyage there’d be some rest from back-breaking work, and being at sea might even be a kind of reprieve: fresher air, new sights, perhaps even some sunshine.

He was to be horribly disappointed.

~

Along with nearly five hundred other convicts he boarded the Neptune in December 1789. They quickly realised that the hulks had been merely a prelude to further suffering.

After a month of loading provisions for the voyage, as well as tools, animals and equipment for the colonial settlement, they sailed out of Portsmouth harbour in mid- January 1790.[xii] There was no opportunity for prisoners to watch the dwindling shores of England—from the outset they were bundled below decks, the seventy-eight women in a separate area, the men chained in twos or threes on a lower deck.

The prisoners could not have known it, but the ship and its captain, Donal Traill, had previously been in the business of transporting enslaved people from Africa to North America. The new cargo was treated in a similar way.

They were starved on low rations, because the Captain had orders from the Neptune’s owners, the private contractors Camden, Calvert & King, to sell excess provisions on the way if possible. The Government contract paid a flat rate per prisoner boarded each ship. It had nothing to say about how many should be disembarked once they reached Sydney Cove. It was a perfect opportunity for contractors out to make an easy profit.

The ship anchored at Cape Town in April, too late for the forty-eight men and one woman who had already died.[xiii] Many of those still alive, especially the men kept in irons for the whole voyage, were desperately ill: malnourished, their muscles atrophying from lack of movement, infections from lying in their own filth. The stench of rotting teeth and gums from scurvy, the dreaded blight of life at sea, filled the close air of the prisoners’ decks. Some lemon or lime juice would have fixed that, but not for these prisoners.

They were tormented by lice, suffered in the hot airlessness of the tropics, then shivered in the colder southern regions. The meagre food was often fought over by those who could still fight. Sometimes, no fighting was necessary: if a prisoner died, those closest would quickly take the rations and hope the death would not be discovered for a little while. When a corpse was found by guards, it would be taken above and tossed unceremoniously into the sea.

There was plenty of death. It was the one thing the hell-ship had in abundance.

The Neptune made good time on this voyage, sailing into Port Jackson on 28 June 1790, but one hundred and fifty men and eleven women had not survived the voyage. Once known, the total number of dead convicts on the Second Fleet appalled even authorities in far-off London: over a quarter of all prisoners on the four transport ships that made up the fleet, and a third of those wretches on the Neptune, died on the journey. Within eight months of arrival, forty percent were dead.[xiv]

For the ragged, starving convicts of the First Fleet and their equally hungry guards on shore that day, who were hoping the new ships had brought fresh supplies and strong bodies to help grow more food, the sight of the crippled, dying and very sick passengers disembarking from the Neptune was horrifying. More mouths to feed, more sick bodies to care for in the rudimentary hospital. The rations across the tiny, struggling settlement had already been drastically reduced by Governor Philip. How were they to survive without additional food and healthy people to do the work needed?

Even so, some of those watching were reduced to pity, even tears, at the plight of those crawling from the bowels of the Neptune. William was one of the survivors.

Work and freedom

His next challenge was simple: keep surviving. Firstly he had to get through his seven year sentence. In those early years, newly arrived convicts were set to work on the many projects needed by a fledgling settlement clinging to the edge of a huge, unknown continent. These included building, constructing rudimentary roads to make moving around the township easier, making bricks, fishing, growing grain or vegetables in the struggling government gardens. Prisoners were also assigned to military personnel and officers as servants and labourers.

Shelters were tents or simple wattle and daub huts with woven branches for shutters at their windows. Convicts built their own shelter, grew what food they could from a garden plot in their own time, lined up at the government store for dwindling rations.

During the months on board the hulks and the Neptune, William must have decided not to make the same mistake that had brought him to this wild British outpost. He worked hard in his assignment in Sydney and avoided coming to the attention of the guards or convict overseers for the wrong reasons. His industry was rewarded. Along with the punishments meted out for wrongdoing, there were some rewards for good behaviour.

By January 1794, just four years after his arrival in chains, he had been granted thirty acres of land in Sydney Town, near the Brickfields on the southern side of the settlement.[xv] This year was significant for another reason: he had served his sentence and was now a free man.[xvi] Never to return to his native England, he instead turned his mind to creating a new life in this place under the southern skies.

The land of New South Wales had been claimed for Britain by the first Governor, Arthur Phillip, in 1788. However, there was no negotiation, agreement, or treaty with the original people of that land. From then on, it was the Governor and his successors who decided who ‘owned’ or had the right to occupy, particular parcels of land. Land became one of the ways in which settlers’ and convicts’ behaviour could be rewarded, controlled or manipulated. Any convicts who wondered who really owned the land they were clearing, cultivating, or building on, generally kept those thoughts to themselves.

Did William or his fellow emancipists ever wonder about the Governor’s ability to hand out tracts of land to whomever he pleased? In their day-to-day work and movements around Sydney Town and outlying regions, convicts and freed men and women would encounter the people who had lived there before the English ships arrived. These meetings were sometimes friendly, sometimes not. The ‘natives’ had an uncanny ability to melt into the bushland when they needed to, but they were beginning to push back against the encroachments of the white strangers.

From the first months after January 1788, the Indigenous people around Sydney had been struck down in horrifying numbers by unfamiliar diseases. Those who’d arrived on the first fleet of convict ships, witnessed dead and dying people all around the harbour and its surrounds. The white settlers’ activities continued to destroy the waterways, food sources and hunting grounds that the Eora, Dharug and other groups relied on for their physical, spiritual, family, and cultural needs.

But the original people stayed, survived and resisted the theft of their Country.

Whether William and other transportees ever gave them much thought, is another question.

William and Jane’s story will be continued in my next post.
If you want to follow along on the journey and have not yet subscribed, you can do so here.

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[i] Birmingham Gazette April 2, 1787,
via https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/ariss-birmingham-gazette, accessed 31 Jan 2026

[ii] WR’s Warwick Assizes record: https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C8999560
Reference: HO 47/6/91 Fol. 307.  Date: 1787 Mar 31 Held by: The National Archives, Kew.
Accessed 28 Nov 2025

[iii] Warwickshire County Record Office; Warwick, England; Warwickshire Anglican Registers; Roll: Engl/2/1015; Document Reference: DR 43 (for William Roberts) Accessed 29 Nov 2025

[iv] See Author’s Note re factors guiding assumptions made about locations and records for this Roberts family.

[v] Warwickshire County Record Office; Warwick, England; Warwickshire Anglican Registers; Roll: Engl/2/1015; Document Reference: DR 43 (for Elizabeth Roberts); Warwickshire County Record Office; Warwick, England; Warwickshire Anglican Registers; Roll: Engl/2/1015; Document Reference: DR 43 (for Thomas Roberts). Accessed 29 Nov 2025

[vi] England, Warwickshire, Parish Registers, 1535-1963, database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-DZCS-LVB?cc=1462403&wc=XDTP-BZ9%3A42645501%2C1583866127%2C1583866128 : 13 March 2019), Warwickshire > Leamington-Hastings > Baptisms, marriages, burials 1705-1812 > image 23 of 80; from parish registers of the Church of England. Database and images, Warwick County Record Office, England. Accessed 29 Nov 2025

[vii] England, Select Births and Christenings, 1538-1975 FHL Film Number 548390, 555353, Web address /search/collections/9841/records/121235106?tid=73626398&pid=202711239221&ssrc=pt
Warwickshire County Record Office; Warwick, England; Warwickshire Anglican Registers; Roll: Engl/2/1015; Document Reference: DR 43 (for Job Roberts 1);
Warwickshire County Record Office; Warwick, England; Warwickshire Anglican Registers; Roll: Engl/2/1015; Document Reference: DR 43;
Burial record for Job Roberts 1765 at FreeReg: https://www.freereg.org.uk/search_records/65b28ae2f493fd5ab33201eb/job-roberts-burial-warwickshire-leamington-hastings-1765-06-16?locale=en (for Job Roberts 2)
All accessed 29 Nov 2025

[viii] https://www.ourwarwickshire.org.uk/content/catalogue_her/wootton-hall-park. Accessed 30 Nov 2025

[ix] Treasury records [T 1, 7, 39, 46, 62, 64, 172, 176, 229, 236, 247], 1783-1956 [microform]/Fonds T./Series T1/Subseries (Pieces 587-3031)/File 653. AJCP Reel No: 3551/Item 164/Lord Sydney with Mr Campbell’s return of convicts on board the Ceres and Stanislaus hulks
Via Trove at http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1271439159. Accessed 30 Nov 2025

[x] https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/prison-hulks-britain-conditions-escapes-transportation-social-reform-charles-dickens/ Accessed 30 Nov 2025

[xi] Treasury records [T 1, 7, 39, 46, 62, 64, 172, 176, 229, 236, 247], 1783-1956 [microform]/Fonds T./Series T1/Subseries (Pieces 587-3031)/File 658. AJCP Reel No: 3551/Item. Lion’s report and accounts/
Via Trove at http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1271598671. Accessed 30 Nov 2025

[xii] https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/neptune  Accessed 30 Nov 2025

[xiii] Michael Flynn; The Second Fleet: Britain’s Grim Convict Armada of 1790 (Sydney: Library of Australian History, 2001) p1

[xiv] Michael Flynn; The Second Fleet: Britain’s Grim Convict Armada of 1790 p1

[xv] State Records Authority of New South Wales; Kingswood, NSW, Australia; Archive Reel: 1999; Series: NRS 1213; Description: Colonial Secretary: List of all Grants and Leases 1788-1809.
Via Ancestry.com, accessed 1 Dec 2025

[xvi] State Records Authority of New South Wales; Kingswood, New South Wales, Australia; Title: Muster of Prisoners in the Colony, 1810-1820; Volume: 4/1237. Via Ancestry.com, accessed 2 Dec 2025

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Author’s Note on historical records: the Roberts Family

Locating the correct records for a family with such a common name as ‘Roberts’ is challenging, to say the least. My aim is to only include information for which I have verified sources. In some situations, I have had to do some guesswork, choosing those records which make sense based on the person’s location, age, life circumstances. Then I’ll use phrases or words like ‘about,’ ‘possibly,’ ‘likely to have been.’

Footnotes will take you to verified sources where I’m confident I have the correct records; but I will always indicate if there is uncertainty about a particular fact or record.

In the case of the Roberts, I am sure that the family lived in the county of Warwickshire for at least several generations. The Roberts name pops up across the county; however I have pinpointed connections of family members across generations, around a cluster of small villages and hamlets in the region near Stratford-Upon-Avon (famous as Shakespeare’s birthplace) and east to Rugby. This area is south and southeast of the city of Birmingham.

Location is a factor that I use in my guesswork around which Roberts records belong in ‘my’ Roberts tree: is it reasonable, given the historical time in which the record was generated, for a person to have been baptised in one village but end up at the other side of the county? Certainly that could happen, but where there is a Roberts record closer to their place of origin that fits all the other available facts, I will tend to favour that one.

Family circumstance is another piece of the puzzle. These people were mostly poor, so unlikely to have estates worth making a will for. Marriages licences were expensive; most working class people obtained permission to marriage via having the ‘marriage banns’ (intention to wed) published three times in their local parish prior to the wedding day. My reasoning here is that marriage records involving a licence are less likely to be for my Roberts folk.

Age, marital status, children: all additional pieces to fit into the big jigsaw of constructing a family tree, when the family name is such a common one and records not as forthcoming or informative as they are today.

I hope this gives you some insight into my thinking and that it helps you in making your own decisions about all this as you read.