Colonial Social Life in Old Registers 1-9

Old Registers 1-9 have primarily been used for tracing land ownership but they also record many personal transactions that reveal details of social relationships in early New South Wales.

One of the more unusual transactions concerns the gifts of George Cribb who had a butcher’s shop and slaughter house in Gloucester Street Sydney during Governor Macquarie’s administration. His house and slaughter yards were excavated as part of the Big Dig between Cumberland and Gloucester Street in the Rocks in 1994. The remains can still be seen under the Sydney Youth Hostel.

George Cribb and his wives

George Cribb was a convict transported at the Wiltshire Assizes in 1807 for 14 years for uttering two forged bank notes.¹ George arrived in Sydney aboard the Admiral Gambier in December 1808.

While still a convict under sentence, George acquired property in The Rocks. The Old Register reveals that in 1810 he purchased a house on the Rocks from Catherine Moran for £35 and another from Frances Staunton for £18.² In May 1811 he purchased No 71 Cumberland Street for £40 from Catherine Johnson.³

A woman named in trial accounts as Ann Cribb was convicted with George Cribb for the same crime and received the same sentence. The convict records show that a woman called Fanny Barnett whose alias was Ann Cribb arrived in Sydney on the Speke in November 1808. Fanny Barnett received a ticket of leave in February 1811.⁴ George Cribb, dealer, signed his name when he married Fanny Barnett at St Phillips Church of England Sydney by special licence in February 1811. Fanny signed with X.⁵

Aged 31, Cribb was a butcher. Meat was an essential part of the colonial diet. Even though the Cow Pastures had been discovered with the wild runaway cattle, it took years to get a large colonial herd of cattle. George Cribb received a conditional pardon in June 1814 and from this date his career flourished. By late 1814 Cribb was employing convict servants at Liverpool, presumably as stockmen and the Sydney Gazette frequently listed George Cribb as supplying the Commissariat with meat.

Colonial records do not reveal the arrival (or departure) of a woman called Fanny Stretch. However, a little genealogical searching revealed that Fanny Stratch was baptised on 14 October 1776 at Berwick St John, Wiltshire, England, the daughter of Samuel and Elizabeth Stratch or Stretch.⁷ A little more digging into the local history found a diary reference that Mrs Stretch’s daughter had been sent to Botany Bay.⁸ Fanny Stretch was the baptismal surname of Fanny Barnett, alias Ann Cribb, and now Mrs Fanny Cribb of Sydney – a useful reminder of the multiplicity of names used by convict women. That her birth name was used perhaps reinforced the serious intent of the promise.

Fanny Barnett, alias Ann Cribb, received a free pardon dated 31 January 1815 which was delivered to her on 6 February 1815, and the promise was registered the following month.⁹ Fanny Cribb gave notice of her intention to depart the colony in the Sydney Gazette on 29 April 1815.¹⁰ She sailed on the Indefatigable in July 1815.¹¹

Why was George Cribb so anxious to see his colonial wife, and partner in crime, leave New South Wales? He had a wife in England who intended to join her successful husband in the colony! Mary Cribb was aboard the female convict ship Northampton, one of a number of free wives of convicts already in New South Wales who were given a free passage to the colony. The Northampton sailed from Portsmouth in January 1815, arriving in Sydney on 18 June 1815.¹² The surgeon on the Northampton was Joseph Arnold and he reported to Governor Macquarie on arrival, noting that three free women had absconded at Rio de Janeiro, one of whom was Mary Cribb.¹³

What was George Cribb to do? Would Mary Cribb make her way to New South Wales, stay in Rio, or return to England. No record has been found of her arrival in New South Wales, though George took no chances. Another deed of gift was registered in the Old Register. Dated 29 December 1815 and registered on 2 January 1816, George Cribb gave his first (unnamed) wife all his goods and chattels and household furniture.¹⁴ Perhaps this was stock for the shop she reputedly set up in Rio?¹⁵

One observer of the lives of Fanny and Mary Cribb was Dr Jospeh Arnold. He noted the irony of bringing out one Mrs Cribb on the Northampton, on which he was surgeon superintendent, and returning to England on the Indefatigable with another Mrs Cribb, wife of the same man. Sadly Fanny Stretch/Barnett/Cribb did not get to enjoy her £300 and return to England. Dr Arnold’s journal reported the death of Fanny Cribb, ‘formerly a convict and wife or mistress to a butcher in Sydney’ who died of a local fever at Batavia on 15 October 1815.¹⁶ Her travelling companions had to abandon ship a few weeks later when the Indefatigable was destroyed by fire on 27 October 1815, the destruction documented in the Sydney Gazette 29 June 1816 which reported that the passengers were evacuated but all their possessions were destroyed.¹⁷ It was not until 1820 that diarist Charlotte Grove visited Betsey Stretch at Berwick St John, Wiltshire to hear that her daughter Fanny was dead and all her property of £700 destroyed in a fire on the ship. An acquaintance hastened to check the facts with Lloyd’s. Barely three weeks later Charlotte visited Fanny’s older sister, Rachel Stretch, to commiserate on the death of her mother Betsey.¹⁸

In June 1816, Cribb made a public call for people to pay their debts to him.¹⁹ By mid 1816 George Cribb owed £600 to Alexander Riley and mortgaged a number of his properties, including the houses in the Rocks and a Minto farm.²⁰ There is some evidence that he was grazing cattle at the Illawarra. In May 1816 Lieutenant Parker of the 46^th Regiment reported from near Port Kembla that a bullock belonging to ‘Mr Cribb’ had been slaughtered to feed his men. The reminiscences of Charles Throsby Smith noted that George Cribb had brought cattle down prior to Meehan surveying the first grant in the district in December 1816.²¹

By late 1817 George was back in Sydney and had reopened his butcher shops in Cambridge Street and Pitt Street.²² The following year he married the widow of a neighbour, Stafford Lett. In December 1815 when Cribb had lost his pocket book on the road to Parramatta, he nominated Stafford Lett as a person to whom it could be given.²³ Stafford Lett had arrived on the Hillsborough in 1799 with a 7 year sentence. In 1807 he married Sophia Blundell who had arrived on the Experiment in 1804 with a life sentence, having been initially capitally convicted. Lett was a publican in Sydney, licensee of the Punch Bowl hotel in Cambridge Street. He died in November 1817, aged 38, leaving Sophia pregnant with twins, who were born in February 1818, and three older children.²⁴ In May 1818 she married George Cribb by licence, signing her name.²⁵

Sophia Lett was a wealthy widow, and she recognised the importance of preserving her children’s inheritance. Married women lost control of their property to their husbands. The Old Register recorded the legal steps that Sophia took to ensure George did not have access to the inherited properties. She employed lawyers Frederick Garling and George Allen to prepare a trust deed which was drawn up on 26 May 1820 and registered on 30 June. In it George Cribb and Sophia formerly Lett transferred to her trustees William Wybrow, bricklayer, and George Woodford, upholsterer, three houses in Cambridge Street, another at Cockle Bay, and 20 cows, to use the rents to educate the children of Stafford Lett – Martha, Elizabeth, William, Stafford John and Sophia – until they reached 21 years of age.²⁶

George’s marriage to Sophia fell apart in 1823, when he published a caution against giving credit to his wife because she has left her home without provocation and warned his tenants not to pay any rents to her.²⁷ His butchering business was frequently advertised, and the quality of his meat supported by men such as Charles Throsby of Glenfield.²⁸ However, by 1826 his business was struggling with the properties in Cambridge Street and others in Princes Street offered for sale.²⁹ A charge of cattle stealing against Cribb was dismissed in November 1830, when the jury could not reach agreement.³⁰

Cribb, now described an elderly man, was committed for trial for cattle stealing in October 1841. The Australian commented that:

Cribb was acquitted when the case came to court in January 1842. A decade later in Feb 1853 he was found guilty of horse stealing. Presumably a gaol sentence followed.

Now in his seventies, George Cribb had ended up with no wife, no children and no assets.