A dawn debacle this morning involving trains very nearly saw us miss our flight from Oslo back to England. We ran through the station and dashed through the airport, reaching check-in seconds before the gate would have closed in our faces. Three hours later we were cruising down the M3 motorway west of London headed for the tiny village of Thruxton in county Hampshire. It looks a prosperous enough place but it hasn’t always been like this.
In the late 1820s living conditions for many English agricultural workers and their families had become grim. There was a surfeit of labour, and the situation was exacerbated by the introduction of farm machinery and a succession of crop failures, both further reducing the need for men at harvest time. Deep discontent bubbled over into rioting in late 1830, the men taking out their frustration on the threshing machines now widely used on farms. Anonymous letters were sent to farmers, threatening that if they didn’t destroy their own machines, the men would come and do it for them. In many cases, this is exactly what happened. Often too, after converging on a farm and destroying the machines, the men would demand a sovereign from the farmer on the way out. The farmers often paid up in the hope of avoiding further trouble.
Penalties for misbehaviour at the time were very harsh and the Government resolved to crack down hard on the rioters to discourage others becoming involved. Several hundred men were rounded up and tried at a special court set up at Winchester. Heavy penalties were imposed, including transportation for many years, even for life, to the penal colonies in Australia. Even worse, many of those who had demanded money from the farmers were sentenced to death by hanging, their actions being deemed robbery which carried the death penalty at the time. One of these was Thomas Gregory, a skilled carpenter from the village of Thruxton. He was arrested, separated from his wife Maria and infant sons, taken in chains to Winchester, and incarcerated in the county gaol to await his fate. But the lives of most of those condemned, including Thomas Gregory, were spared following a groundswell of public opinion and agitation that recognized there were genuine grievances underlying the rioters’ actions.
On 22 December 1830 Thomas Gregory was tried for machine breaking and robbery, his trial reported in The Times of London. The Judged singled Thomas out, noting that “the prisoner Gregory, it appears, was in the service of Lord Winchester, and was earning 18 shillings a week as a carpenter. He, therefore, had not even the plea of distress to urge – if that could be urged in any case, as a palliation for his offence.” The Judge then sentenced Thomas to death, but this was later commuted to seven years transportation to the Australian penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land (now known as Tasmania). Thomas was transferred to the prison hulk York moored at Gosport in Portsmouth Harbour and a few weeks later, in chains, loaded onto the convict ship Proteus that set sail for Hobart on the other side of the world. In Van Diemen’s Land, Thomas was assigned to a government work gang where no doubt his carpentry skills were put to good use.
Back in England there was growing disquiet at the harsh penalties meted out, and six years later the men convicted of machine breaking and/or robbery in the riots of late 1830 were pardoned. But only a handful of them, perhaps fewer than 20, ever made it back to England to see their families again. One of these was Thomas Gregory.
But living conditions for working people in southern England were still grim, and Thomas, despite the rigours of convict life, had seen a new way of life and opportunity on the other side of the world. He’d obviously heard that a new colony was being established in South Australia, this one not a convict colony, and it needed skilled workers. And so it was that Thomas Gregory now a free man, wife Maria, and four young sons including six month old Alfred, set sail for South Australia in early 1839 on the ship Asia. But it was a voyage scarred with much tragedy. Infectious disease broke out killing many children, including Thomas and Maria’s baby Alfred who died of typhoid and was consigned overboard to the deep on 9 April 1839 after a short, grim, funeral service on the main deck.
Asia docked off Adelaide on 16 July 1839, barely two years after the new colony of South Australia had been proclaimed, and at a time when there was still not a single road in Adelaide. Even the main streets, Rundle and Hindley, were still just dirt tracks. Thomas and Maria worked hard and within a few years they had become land owners and achieved a standard of living they could never have dreamt of in England.
It would be nice to think that after all he had suffered, Thomas spent his older years sitting contentedly with Maria on the front veranda of his “Thruxton Cottage” that he had built himself on his farm, and named after his home village in England. But this wasn’t how his life ended. On 13 April 1860, Thomas returned home to his farm on horseback from Adelaide. He had stopped at an Inn on the way and had drunk too much. When the horse arrived home it leant down to drink from a pond, and Thomas toppled forward over its neck into the murky water below. He was found by his sons a couple of hours later, in the words of the Coroner’s Report, “quite dead and cold”. The Coroner concluded: “The deceased was accidentally drowned in a horse-pond while in a state of intoxication.” Thomas was only 62 years old.
Maria survived Thomas by 21 years; she died at the age of 84 on 22 September 1881. Both Thomas and Maria are buried in the Golden Grove cemetery in Adelaide, South Australia.
It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair Maria must have felt when Thomas was taken away in chains in late 1830. She was a young mother with three sons at the time, the youngest only a year old, and it was expected that Thomas would never be able to return to England and they would never see him again. But Thomas did come back – albeit six years later.
Other women had it even worse. In the words of one writer describing the human cost of the riots and their aftermath, “For 65 years, one woman, not far from my home, through her young womanhood and middle and old age, slept wakefully at nights and moved silently by day, listening always for footsteps. In 1831 her husband and brother had both been transported – one for 14 years, the other for 7 years – for their part in the riots. Till the 14 years had passed she would not let herself expect them. The one must wait for the other, she said. But at the end of that time for almost 50 years she hoped through each hour; and she died in her chair turned towards the East, because she had heard that it was out of the sunrise that travellers from Australia must come.”
That was exactly the direction from which we had come early this morning, on our way to Thruxton. But of course the Gregorys had long gone. Which was very fortunate for me, for had none of this astonishing tale happened, I would never have been born. Thomas Gregory is my great-great grandfather.
Our bus from Marrakesh pulled into Casablanca city centre around noon on Monday. I kept an eye out for Humphrey and Ingrid, but it seems the days when Casablanca was an exotic destination and stuff of dreams have long gone. Now it seems a relatively modern city you might see anywhere - international company and brand names top the buildings facing the thoroughfares lined with tall palm trees leading into the city. 
