Major William Sandys Elrington (1780–1860) was a British military officer, veteran of the Peninsula War, and colonial settler of New South Wales, Australia. He is associated with the locality of Farringdon and the village of Majors Creek, both near Braidwood.
Family background, early life and military career Elrington was born in Devon. He was the eighth child of Captain Thomas Elrington (1722—1809), at the time of Elrington's birth commander of a company of the Corps of Invalids at the Royal Citadel at Plymouth, and his wife Rebecca (1742—1823) née Goodall.
Elrington came from a long line of soldiers, and was descended—at least, so he believed—from William the Conqueror. His father had fought in both the suppression of the Jacobite rising of 1745, at Culloden, and in the Seven Years War in North America. Before and after his father's time at Plymouth, Elrington's family lived at Low Hill House, at White Ladies Aston, Worcestershire. His father was buried at the local church, St John the Baptist, as are two other military relatives, his brother Major-General Richard Goodall Elrington (1776—1845), and his brother-in-law, married to his sister Ellzabeth Mary, Major-General John Montresor Pilcher.
Elrington followed his family's tradition of employment and joined the army in 1795, taking a commission in a regiment raised for the West Indies. He had a 29-year military career, including service in the Peninsula War (from August 1809 to January 1813) with the 11th Regiment of Foot. before selling his commission, in 1826, and migrating to Australia.
New South Wales
Migration Elrington left Plymouth, in November 1826, and arrived in Sydney aboard Elizabeth, in April 1827, with his second son, Richard, and a much older woman, Mary Smith, who acted as their housekeeper. Early settlers would remember Elrington as a tall, red-headed, blue-eyed man, of soldierly bearing, carrying a scar on his forehead from being slashed with a sabre.
He had migrated to New South Wales during the administration of Governor Ralph Darling. Darling had been appointed with the objective of restoring discipline to the penal colony, after what was seen by the British government of the time as the relatively lax rule of Governor Macquarie and Governor Brisbane. Darling tended to rely upon like-minded military men to staff his administration, and he favoured many such men with grants of land.
Before Elrington had left England, he already had a land grant in New South Wales. He was appointed as a magistrate in 1828. In 1830, he was one of a number of prominent colonists, who were appointed as justices-of-the-peace, by Governor Darling.
Mount Elrington and other landholdings After settler colonisation, the area now known as Farringdon lay within the Nineteen Counties that were open to settlement. Elrington took up his land grant of 2560 acres there, which became known as 'Mount Elrington', in 1827. His new estate lay, in the upper part of the valley of the Shoalhaven River, on a left-bank tributary now known as Mount Creek. Early settlers said that the native name for the area was Jingro, Jinero, or Jineroo. It lay on the traditional lands of the Walbanga people, a group of the Yuin, from whom it was taken by the land grant. In its early years, Mount Elrington was the location of an annual distribution of government blankets to the surviving Aboriginal people.
Mount Elrington was one of the earliest colonial settlements, in the area south of what would later, in 1839, become the town of Braidwood, Three other early settlers—Duncan Mackellar, John Coghill, and Thomas Braidwood Wilson—also took up land around Braidwood.
By 1828, using convict labour, he had cleared 500 acres of land and the estate was soon self-sufficient. Around 600 acres of the land was rich, alluvial, river-flat country, much of which may not have needed significant clearing. Although at the time the land was remote, it was arable and well-watered.
In 1829, William Tarlington (1804—1893), with three Aboriginal guides, starting at Braidwood, followed the rivers into the Bega Valley, where he found good land and later settled as a squatter at Cobargo. Like other Braidwood landholders, Elrington took up two blocks there, as a squatter, in the early 1830s, but he did not settle there.
Unlike a number of other landholders in the Braidwood district, Elrington does not appear to have been a supporter or financial backer of The Wool Road, to Jervis Bay. In fact, around the same time, in 1842, he seems to have been involved in raising subscription funding for a rival private road, from Bellalaba to the port of Broulee. Such a road would have connected Mount Elrington to a seaport on the coast. The road was have followed part of a cart route blazed by Charles Nicholson, from Broulee to the Monaro, in 1841.
By August 1844, then 64 years old and seeking to retire, Elrington was trying to sell his land. By then, his landholding consisted of three large pieces of land; 'Mount Elrington' (2560 acres), 'Smithleagh' (1865 acres, on two titles of 1220 and 645 acres, its northern boundary adjoining Mount Elrington, and its eastern boundary being the Shoalhaven River) and 'Stork' (2560 acres, four miles east of 'Smithleagh'.) The names of the latter two properties, are significant; it is almost certain that 'Smithleagh' was named for Mary Smith—whose name seems to have been on its two title deeds, as purchaser— and the oddly-named 'Stork' refers to the heraldic animal on the Elrington family coat of arms. There were also a large number of horses, sheep and cattle, some grazing on other land, as far away as the Monaro. By that time, Elrington was breeding fine horses. It appears that Elrington's land came with some pre-emptive rights, to adjoining government land, and that the total landholding was around 9300 acres. Although he may have used land around what is now Majors Creek for grazing, he seems not to have had title over that area.
His home at Mount Elrington was described as, "a substantial ten-roomed verandah dwelling, with stone store, and kitchen, a garden of six acres, well stocked with the choicest fruit trees, and vegetables, stables, cart sheds, sheep shed, forge, men's huts, saw pits, &c."
Colonial magistrate In May 1828, Elrington was appointed as a magistrate, joining Captain John Coghill and, slightly later, Captain Duncan Mackellar, as the local Police Magistrates. All were local land-owners, using assigned convict labour. In 1838, he would be joined, by a newly-appointed magistrate for the Braidwood district, another ex-military man and landowner, Lieutenant Colonel John Mackenzie of Nerriga. Mercifully, each magistrate was prohibited from trying their own assigned convicts, and for more serious offences were required to adjudicate in pairs.
When the liberal-minded Richard Bourke replaced Ralph Darling as Governor in late 1831, he was horrified at the severity and arbitrary application of punishments being given to convicts. In August 1832, he had passed the Offenders Punishment and Summary Jurisdiction Act, which for the first time both codified and limited the penalties that could be imposed on convicts. There was resistance from existing magistrates, but the reforms were implemented, and improved, if only relatively, the treatment of convicts.
As might be expected from a martinet like Elrington, he was an advocate of summary punishment and greater powers for single magistrates. Hearings were held at his home at Mount Elrington, which given the absence of a nearby town, at the time, was more reasonable than it first might appear. A constable was stationed at Mount Elrington.
Local lore has it that two gum trees, on the Shoalhaven River near Mount Elrington, which were cut down in the 1920s, had been used as makeshift gallows, and hangings were carried out there. This local legend seems unlikely, as magistrates could not impose the death sentence, although they certainly could, and did, impose penalties involving flogging or imprisonment. It is said that, locally, Elrington was known as 'the flogging Major'.
Remoteness from large towns with prisons had consequences. One particularly egregious case was that of a fifteen year old, free-born, orphaned servant girl, Martha Emily Cadman. She had been sentenced by Elrington to three months, in 1836, 'for improper conduct in her hired service', an offence under the draconian Masters and Servants Act (1828). Subsequently, she was raped by one of the ex-convict constables escorting her, during the 200 mile journey made on foot, to the 'House of Correction'. Instead of being allowed, as planned, to stay overnight at an inn at Sutton Forest, she had been made to share a hut with the men, where the rape occurred. The constable, Patrick Brady, and another constable, George Nutter—as an accomplice—were found guilty of rape and sentenced to death, but then the judge ruled that 'in consequence of inquiries he had made respecting the character of the female, their punishment would be commuted'. Despite her personal courage in reporting the offence and later giving evidence, it did not end well for Martha; her reputation had been besmirched publicly by the judge, and, reportedly, she was later the 'kept mistress' of one of the jurors at Brady's trial. By 1845, she was drinking heavily and apparently living as a prostitute. Even at the time, these appalling outcomes were seen as consequences of Elrington's harsh sentencing of Martha, for running away from her employer, who she said had ill used her, and remaining at large for just two days. She had run away, after her employer—Henry Clay Burnell (1806 - 1888), the first settler at Araluen in 1831—and his wife Sarah, née Gray) had forcibly cut off her hair, a punishment of humiliation inflicted upon female convicts for 'vile offences'.
Elrington resigned as a magistrate, unexpectedly, around May 1839. He did not comment publicly on the reason for his sudden resignation, other than to say it was "influenced by the purest of motives." It seems that the cause was a disagreement with Governor Gipps. Elrington had refused to endorse the ticket-of-leave application of one of his former convict stockmen, Patrick Neill, whom he suspected was a cattle thief, but Gipps granted the ticket-of-leave. His resignation can be viewed in the broader context of the disagreement over the future course of the colony, between the reforming governor—preparing the colony for an end to transportation and for self-government—and those opposed to reform—the reactionary faction of landholders known as 'the Exclusives', who relied upon assigned convict labour for their low-cost workforce, and the squatters, who would later form the Pastoral Association of New South Wales.
Convict servants As part of the convict system, male and female convicts were assigned to landowners, as labourers, stockmen, gardeners, shepherds, servants, or people with trades of various kinds. By 1841, there were 59 people living at Mount Elrington, the majority of whom were assigned convicts. It is reported that at dinner time, Elrington sat at one end of the table and at the other, his son, Richard, each with a loaded pistol, and that no convict servant was allowed to walk behind either of them. Recalcitrant convicts were kept in a small prison at Mount Elrington.