The penny they left
In 1833 Thomas Alsop, a brick labourer of twenty-one, was convicted in Staffordshire of stealing a sheep. He was sentenced to transportation for life. He could not write, so someone else engraved a penny for his mother.
The coin was usually a cartwheel penny, the large copper piece first minted in 1797, with George III on one side and Britannia on the other. The portraits sat low enough to be rubbed flat. A name, a date and one sentence would fit on what was left. Halfpennies, twopences and sixpences were smoothed in the same way. Some tokens are plainly by the same hand. The National Museum of Australia notes that forgers, jewellers, silversmiths and engravers, themselves waiting to be shipped, seem to have made them for other convicts, and earned a little by it.
About 160,000 convicts were sent to the Australian colonies before transportation ended in 1868. The penny was a keepsake the convict arranged, and it was given to the person who would still be there, a mother, a wife, an aunt or an uncle. The National Museum of Australia holds 315 of them, dated from 1762 to 1856. The earliest predate transportation to Australia. The museum says they would have been made for convicts sent to other British penal colonies. Most of the collection was acquired in 2008 from Timothy Millett, a London dealer who had tried to trace the names. Many families had wished to conceal a convict past, and a great many of the names went no further. Some of the discs are pierced, so they could be worn. On some, the name has been scratched out.
Alsop’s penny measures 35 millimetres across and 2 millimetres thick. One side is a three-masted ship, and under it: “Accept this dear Mother from your unfortunate son Thos. Alsop. Transported July 25 Aged 21 1833.” The other side reads “The rose soon drupes & dies. the brier fades away. but my fond heart for you I love. shall never go astray.” Drupes is the engraver’s spelling. Thomas Dexter, aged 27, and William Dexter, aged 77, were tried with him for the sheep and were acquitted. Alsop left on the Moffatt on 29 January 1834, bound for Van Diemen’s Land. A second penny, made for a person the museum has not identified, remains in a private collection.
He did not come home. On arrival he was put in a chain gang. In July 1835 he tried to abscond and was sentenced to 36 lashes. He was granted a conditional pardon on 7 November 1848 and a full pardon on 5 February 1850, and he stayed, because he could not pay the fare. He married Irish-born Sarah Eliza Kirk. In 1854 they had a son, Thomas, and sixteen months later a daughter, Sarah. He was then a fish hawker in Hobart. He died in 1891. The penny made for his mother is in the museum.
The words were not always meant for a sweetheart. A token of 1832 in the same collection, 36 millimetres across, is inscribed “A Token of Love from your Unfortunate Nephew J. Riley Septr 16th 1832.” On the reverse a heart contains the single word “love”, and the top of the disc says “Forget me not J Riley 1832.” The museum says this one appears to be by the same hand as tokens made for William Kennedy and for T. King. Riley’s penny names the nephew who was leaving.
A smoothed penny has room for a name, a date and one sentence. With the king’s head gone, the copper could no longer be spent. What it could still do was carry the sentence. Alsop’s says who it was for. The penny has kept it.