Talk:John Knatchbull (Royal Navy captain)

Additional information

• http://www.jasa.net.au/newsdc99.htm quotes from Ruth Paark's Sydney at some lenth.

At Darlinghurst gaol, just outside the gaol gates, is a dusty plot of grass where Sydney folklore says the gibbet used to stand. Some celebrated felons were disjointed here, including bushrangers ... but the most interesting must surely have been Captain John Knatchbull, RN, a gentleman of an ancient Kent family (into which Lord Mountbatten later married), and a remote connection of Jane Austen’s, who brought a versatile black sheep’s career to a smashing climax when he walloped a widowed shopkeeping lady with a tomahawk. ‘The devil made me do it’, he maintained. But he was really after her rumoured savings, which he intended should pay for his wedding and set him up in business ...

Class always counted strongly in the style of Sydney, as it did everywhere the British trod. Hardly had the colony been founded than it evolved class distinctions of its own.

Gentlemen-convicts were even put into a special camp, where unfrocked clergymen, cashiered officers, disgraced lawyers and exposed bankers got special treatment. Once such was naval officer John Knatchbull. Dismissed the service for ‘behaviour unbecoming an officer’, this patent psychopath was transported in 1825 for picking a pocket in London, but was not deterred. He beat a man to death on the voyage out. He tried to poison the entire crew of the ship taking him to Norfolk Island. He murdered a woman with a tomahawk. Yet he was given his own servant on the journey to Botany Bay (the man he beat to death) and to the very day of his eventual execution by hanging in Sydney in 1844, he was surrounded by suggestions of aristocratic privilege. ...

Knatchbull’s execution beside the Darlinghurst Gaol gates attracted the largest mob of thrilled sightseers ever known in a city already famous for the ghoulish curiosity of its populace. The weeks before the hanging had been marked by public processions of the lower-class, carrying black flags marked with death’s heads, who feared that because of the accused’s higher station, he would be reprieved. ‘Equal punishment for high and low’ was their cry. The Sydney newspapers covered the hanging to ‘the last light quivering of the body’, albeit adopting a righteous and hectoring tone towards the 110,000 spectators who stood for hours in the February heat of that early morning, pressing against the chain which held them at a distance from the gallows, and chiacking the mounted police who patrolled the barrier.

Knatchbull wore a new suit of fine black broadcloth, reputedly a gift from Lady Gipps, the wife of the governor, so that he could die like a gentleman and not let the side down. He didn’t. He had been converted to religion some time prior to his execution, and conducted himself with dignity, being ‘launched into another world with a noble and fervent prayer trembling on his lips’. The crowd was shocked into a dismayed silence, and dispersed quickly and quietly.

Quoted from Ruth Park’s Sydney, Ruth Park and Rafe Champion, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, Revised edition 1999, pp72-3, 134-5.

To be incorporated - noting qualifications at http://www.jasa.net.au/newsju01.htm#story6 --Matilda ^talk 06:00, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I added some sections before rating it but as you have more to add you will no doubt want to change them.--Grahame (talk) 01:41, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Jane Austen connection

If the genealogies given are correct, his nephew married Jane Austen's niece... Churchh (talk) 22:40, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

• Yes - but I am not sure of the relevance of that factoid --Matilda ^talk 07:25, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't know if it should be included in the article, but I found it interesting. Churchh (talk) 16:02, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

The point has been made by the Jane Austen Society of Australia in their Dec 99 newsletter and also their June 2001 newsletter. Jane Austen's niece married into the Knatchbull family after Jane Austen's death. Knatchbull was transported also after her death. She knew nothing of the incident. In my view WP:UNDUE applies - might be true but it has no relevance and does not belong here. --Matilda ^talk 00:45, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

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