George Bawn & Ellen McIntosh

George Bawn’s own transportation record gives his native place as Southwark, London, and his birth year as 1813 — the only starting point that survives independently of his own later say-so. His parents’ names come from a single source: his own account of them, given forty-six years afterward to an 1861 NSW marriage registrar, naming a father, Richard Bawn, a hatter, and a mother, Elizabeth Filce.³ No baptism or other record has been found to confirm either name, and a promising alternative candidate — a “George Boown,” son of a Thomas and Sarah Boown, baptised at St Mary Magdalene, Bermondsey, in February 1812 — remains open rather than settled. See Still Open, below.

The Old Bailey, and the Hulks

What is certain is the crime that sent him to the far side of the world. On 11 September 1830, sixteen or seventeen years old, he snatched a silk handkerchief from the pocket of a Whitehall merchant, Richard Langton, and was caught within yards. Tried at the Old Bailey five days later for stealing from the person, he told the court he had simply picked the handkerchief up off the ground; the jury did not believe him. Found guilty, he was sentenced to seven years’ transportation.⁴

He was received onto the prison hulks from Newgate on 6 November 1830, and held, the surviving register shows, on one of three hulks moored together at Chatham, on the River Medway — the Ganymede, the Dolphin, or the Cumberland. The register does not distinguish between the three, so which of them actually held him cannot presently be said.⁵

Transportation

He was transported almost three years later, departing England on 6 May 1833 aboard the Heroine, under Master Robert McCarthy, and landing in Sydney on 19 September, aged twenty. The indent that recorded him that day gives a physical description exact enough to have been written yesterday: five foot three and a half inches, ruddy complexion, brown hair, hazel-grey eyes, and a set of tattoos — an anchor, a heart pierced by two darts, the initials “M × E,” two tobacco pipes, a bottle and glass, and a crucifix — with a scar at his right eyebrow and another on his right shin.⁶

Absconding, and Freedom

Convict discipline did not suit him. In October 1836 he absconded from assigned service and was recaptured, his name appearing in the Government Gazette’s weekly list of runaways, tagged to “No. 2 Stockade.”⁷ By September 1838 he was in the Bathurst district, alongside prisoners from the nearby Hassans Walls Stockade, telling the authorities flatly that he considered himself a free man and refused further assigned work; he was sent under guard to Sydney “to be identified and dealt with.” He was right to be confident — counted from his 1830 trial, his seven years had already run out — and his Certificate of Freedom was issued in Sydney on 29 September 1838.⁸

A Trade, and a Marriage

By 1849–50 he was settled enough in Sydney to qualify as an elector in the Bourke Ward, his qualifying property a dwelling house at Malcolm’s Buildings; later directories place him at Hay Street, near the Victoria Steam Flour Mill, and then at Francis Street, by then recorded plainly with the trade he kept for the rest of his working life — waterman.⁹ In 1840 he married Ellen McIntosh, daughter of Robert McIntosh and Eleanor Dudgeon — a Sydney family already well established in the colony by the time George arrived in it as a convict.¹⁰ Ellen’s own parents, and her seven brothers and sisters, are told in full in the companion chapter The McIntosh Family, immediately before this one.

George and Ellen had eight children over the following eighteen years, born as the family’s address drifted through the inner city: George Richard (1841), Frances Elizabeth (1843), Caroline Mary (1845), Henry (1847/48), Charles (1851), Frederick Charles (1852), Ellen Caroline (1855) and James (1858).¹¹ Their own lives, so far as they can be told, are set out individually below. Frances Elizabeth’s marriage to a Bathurst coachbuilder, Alfred Baldock, in 1863, is the marriage that opens the chapter that follows.¹

Ellen’s Death

Ellen died on 16 April 1860 at Strawberry Hills, given as thirty-eight years old by the parish clerk — a year or two younger than the family’s usual 1820 birth year, well within the ordinary imprecision of these registers. The burial entry describes George, tellingly, not as a waterman but as “a Storekeeper”: the only record in this entire research to call him anything else, whether a brief change of trade around 1860 or simply the informant’s own choice of word. She was buried two days later, in the Parish of Camperdown burial ground.¹²

A Second Marriage

Ellen’s brother John McIntosh died that same year, leaving his own wife, Mary Jane, a widow. On 30 December 1861, George — a forty-six-year-old widower of Pitt Street South — married her, at the Scots Church, Sydney, by the Rev. Dr John Dunmore Lang: the same minister, and the same church, where his daughter Frances Elizabeth would marry Alfred Baldock a year later. For the rest of his life, George Bawn was married to a woman who had once been his own sister-in-law.¹³

Trouble on the Water

The marriage did not bring an easy decade. Twice within a month, in January and February 1863, George was fined for assault at the Water Police Court — once for punching a man who would not hire his boat to the mail steamer, once for a blow that blacked another man’s eye outside a Circular Quay hotel. In April 1865 his temper cost him his livelihood outright: a sitting member of the Legislative Assembly, James White, hired a rival boatman at Circular Quay, and George climbed into the man’s boat, tried to wrestle the oars away, and held one over White’s head threatening to “smash” it — the Bench cancelled his boat licence on the spot. It did not keep him off the water, or out of trouble: a constable in 1866, a man named Mulhall in 1867, and by November of that year he had deserted Mary Jane outright. Arrested on warrant, he agreed to pay her ten shillings a week; when the payments stopped, he was gaoled in January 1868 “until payment be made.” A separate charge that June, for assaulting a rival boatman named Thomas Thompson, suggests the 1865 licence loss had not kept him off the water for long.¹⁴

Drunkenness, and the Asylum

Drunkenness charges followed him into the new decade — fined for being “drunk and riotous” in Phillip Street in March 1870, and again for drunkenness and obscene language in November 1871. A “George Bawn” appears on the Parramatta Gaol discharge list for December 1877; if it is the same man, it falls suggestively close to the next stage of his life.¹⁵

From his early sixties, George cycled in and out of the Government Asylum at Liverpool — an institution for men too old or too worn out to keep working — at least four times: admitted 25 July 1876, aged sixty-three; discharged the following May; readmitted in September 1878; discharged again in November 1879; and readmitted once more in July 1880, aged sixty-seven. No document found in this research covers the three years after that.¹⁶

Death

George Bawn died on 9 November 1883. His death notice remembered him in four words — “many years waterman on the Circular Quay” — and gave his age as seventy-nine. Every earlier record disagrees: the convict indent, the Certificate of Freedom, and every one of the Liverpool Asylum admissions independently point to a birth year of 1813, and a State Records NSW index card gives his death age, precisely, as seventy. The death notice’s “seventy-nine” is very probably simply wrong.¹⁷

A funeral notice from August 1869, for “the late Mr. George Bawn” of Burton Street, off South Head Road, cannot be his own: later Water Police Court appearances place him unmistakably alive as late as March 1870. Whether it belongs instead to his newly married eldest son, George Richard (below), or to an entirely unconnected Sydney man of the same name, has not been established either way.¹⁸

Mary Jane outlived him by fifteen years, dying on 2 June 1898, aged eighty-four. Her headstone records her name among a Thomas and Jane Argent and their infant son, Herbert — not beside any Bawn or McIntosh relative. Why she shares that particular grave has not been established.¹⁹

What Isn’t Settled Yet

This page draws on more than sixty documents, but a genealogy this size still ends in open questions rather than a closed file. Set out honestly, they are:

Who George’s parents actually were. “Richard Bawn” and “Elizabeth Filce” come from George’s own account of them in 1861, decades after the fact, transcribed by a third party in 2021 — the same transcription that flagged its own uncertainty elsewhere on the same page. No baptism has been found for George under either name. A “George Boown,” baptised at Bermondsey in 1812 to a Thomas and Sarah Boown, fits the geography and the approximate age but not the father’s given name, and is not confirmed.

Which of the three Chatham hulks — Ganymede, Dolphin or Cumberland — actually held him between his November 1830 intake and his September 1833 transportation. The surviving register covers all three together without distinguishing between them.

Whose funeral was reported in August 1869 under George’s own name, given that George himself was demonstrably still alive into 1870.

What became of the ninth Bawn child, a son born in 1862 to George and Mary Jane, registered without a given name in the index consulted. Whether he survived infancy is not known.

Why Mary Jane Bawn is buried in the Argent family’s grave rather than with any known Bawn or McIntosh relative.

What happened to George Richard, the eldest son, after his own 1868 marriage — including whether the 1869 funeral notice above belongs to him.

The correct spelling of James Bawn’s first wife’s maiden name — rendered “O’Hearn” in the clearest surviving record, but “Ahearn,” “Aheran,” “Ahearne” and plain “Hearn” are all equally plausible readings of the same Irish surname.

A minor date discrepancy worth noting for completeness: the NSW BDM birth index gives Frances Elizabeth’s registration year as 1843, one year earlier than the 1844 used elsewhere in this chapter. Neither has been re-verified against the other.