The plaque dedicated to George Weightman on Terralong Street at Kiama. Photo: Kiama Library.
I’ve long been interested in any political radicals transported as convicts to Australia.
So when I came across a 19th century bloke living in the Illawarra who was involved in the 1817 Pentrich Rising charged with high treason and transported for having “unlawfully maliciously and traitorously assembled and gathered together against our said lord the King”, I could not have been more intrigued.
His story begins in a small stone-built pub in the English village of Pentrich in Derbyshire.
The pub was owned by the widow Nanny Weightman (nee Bacon) and much of the highly impromptu planning for the “traitorously assembled” Pentrich Rising happened there.
Thomas Bacon, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars and a framework knitter living in Pentrich, was one of those involved. Bacon’s nephew – 27-year-old George Weightman – was also there.
It was a time when only male land owners had the vote. The grievances of the disenfranchised were exacerbated by economic depression, severe food shortages and the newly enacted Corn Laws inflating the price of bread.
In addition, mechanisation of the textile industry was also putting thousands of skilled weavers and lace makers out of work.
Unemployed framework knitter Jeremiah Brandreth had rallied the Pentrich pub drinkers by chanting: “Turn out and fight for bread. The time is come you plainly see. The Government opposed must be”.
So a mob of stockingers, quarrymen, iron workers and labourers set out to march to Nottingham. They were lightly armed with pikes, scythes and just a few guns.
An engraving of beheaded stocking-maker Jeremiah Brandreth, a central figure in the Pentrich Rising. Photo: Supplied.
However, William J Oliver (aka Oliver the Spy) had infiltrated the gatherings at Nanny Weightman’s Pentrich pub. The decision to launch a protest march was only made when he told the drinkers of a revolutionary force heading from the north – a hoax fabricated by the paid informer Oliver.
So it was all a put-up job and to set an example of any who might dare to propose reform, three of the protestors – Jeremiah Brandreth, William Turner and Isaac Ludlam – were hanged and posthumously beheaded.
Their co-accused George Weightman was sentenced to the same fate, but later had his sentence reduced to transportation for life.
George’s relatives, the much older Thomas and John Bacon, were also transported to NSW aboard the Tottenham in April 1818.
George Weightman’s convict indent described him as a “6 foot high labourer and sawyer” born in 1792. He was said to possess a “ruddy and slightly pockpitted complexion”, dark brown hair and hazel eyes and with a scar on the left side of his lip and other scars on his fingers and thumbs.
What Weightman first did is unclear but in 1821, when Governor Macquarie appointed Captain Francis Allman as commandant at Port Macquarie “as a secondary place of punishment”, Weightman went there too.
By 1823, Allman had given Weightman a Ticket of Leave and when Allman was appointed police magistrate in Illawarra in September 1832, he again encountered Weightman working as a sawyer.
Allman promptly ensured George’s Ticket of Leave for work in Illawarra was renewed in 1833 and also supported George’s application for a conditional pardon of his life sentence.
Allman left Illawarra for Goulburn in March 1834 and the application went nowhere.
But George remained and in May 1834, somehow managed to put his name to an address as a “free inhabitant of Illawarra”.
The intersection of Terralong and Manning streets at Kiama. George Weightman died in the white building on the extreme right of this photo. The building was demolished to make way for the Kiama rail line. Photo: Kiama Library.
Even though found guilty of high treason by means of government entrapment, on 1 January 1835 by “The Grace of the King’s Mercy”, George Weightman miraculously received a free pardon (without applying for it) but not the right to leave the colony.
The 1841 NSW Illawarra census places Weightman living at Jamberoo in a wooden dwelling owned by George Wood, Overseer. He was unmarried and claims to be single – even though when transported he had a wife named Rebecca and three children whom he would never see again.
Similarly, in the 1841 British census his wife claimed she was a widow and even her death certificate records her as the “widow of George Weightman”. After her husband’s transportation, Rebecca worked as a charwoman and laundress to support their kids.
George is listed in an 1839 Post Office Directory as “George Whitman of Kyama Woolongong”.
A plaque placed on a rock in Terralong Street Kiama commemorates the presumed rebel George Weightman.
But the reality is that George was no sort of rebel at all – just a sad victim of government entrapment who forfeited his wife, home and family and would die at the residence of Mr Joseph King, Kiama, on Friday 12 May 1865.
George’s reputation as a rebel is thus pretty misleading and the text beside the Kiama plaque might be assisted by some slight adjustment.
And it’s curious that the other transported supposed political rebels in the Illawarra I’ve researched also seemed to have gone on to live blameless lives and made no attempts at all to overthrow their colonial oppressors.
