Liverpool-born Hannah Rigby arrived in New South Wales on board the Lord Sidmouth 3 in February 1823, sentenced to seven years’ transportation for larceny. Within six months she was involved in a relationship with Robert Crawford, a clerk in the Colonial Secretary’s office. Rigby and Crawford’s son, Robert Frederick Crawford, was born in June 1824 and christened at St John’s Anglican Church, Parramatta in December that year. One month later, Hannah Rigby married the convict she was assigned to, George Page per Shipley. In May 1826, Page was found guilty of ‘grand larceny’ and transported to Moreton Bay for seven years. For this reason, George Page cannot have been the father of Hannah’s second son, Samuel, born three months before the 1828 New South Wales census.

Hannah received her first certificate of freedom in December 1828, but stole ‘with force and arms thirty yards of ribbon valued at £1 belonging to Frederick Boucher’ in late 1829. She was transported to Moreton Bay for seven years, arriving in November 1830. In September 1832 Hannah gave birth to a third son named James Rigby. Hannah’s husband, George Page, was still at the penal settlement and did not leave until 1833. However, the baby’s father was not George Page but James Hexton, the boat pilot at Amity Point on Stradbroke Island. Hannah departed Moreton Bay for Sydney at the expiration of her sentence in February 1837, leaving behind her five-year-old son James Rigby (also known as Jimmy Hexton) with his father at Amity Point. Rigby was granted a second certificate of freedom in March 1837. However, after stealing two hats she was transported back to Moreton Bay in October 1837 to serve a second three-year term.

In May 1839, when most of the convicts departed Moreton Bay, it was decided that five female convicts including Hannah Rigby would remain at Moreton Bay as assigned servants to the officials overseeing the transition to free settlement. Hannah was about 45 years old when she was assigned to the service of the Colonial Assistant Surgeon, Dr David Ballow. In July 1840, Commandant Gorman referred to Hannah as ‘the only Female Prisoner remaining at Moreton Bay’, though Mary Bolger, an ‘Ordinary Prisoner of the Crown’ who arrived after the closure of the penal settlement, was also in the district. The same month, Dr Ballow applied for Hannah to be granted her freedom as she had ‘conducted herself in the most exemplary manner having never given me the slightest cause for distrust or complaint’.

Hannah Rigby’s sentence was remitted in September 1840 and she elected to commence her post-convict life at Moreton Bay, remaining in Brisbane with her youngest son Jimmy Hexton and close to his father James Hexton, who was still working as the boat pilot on Stradbroke Island. The remainder of Hannah’s life was quiet and she is absent from Queensland records for over ten years. Her employer, Dr Ballow, died in 1850 from typhus contracted from passengers on board the Emigrant, one of the first ships to bring free settlers directly to Moreton Bay. James Hexton drowned (and/or was taken by a shark) when his boat capsized in rough seas on his way back from Cape Horn in April 1851. In October 1853, Hannah, who lived alone in a ‘hut’ near Queen Street, died after attending her neighbour’s wedding celebrations. She was buried at the first St John’s Anglican Church near the corner of Queen and George Streets (demolished in 1902 and now the site of the Treasury Hotel and Casino).

Hannah’s youngest son Jimmy Hexton remained in Queensland for the rest of his life, marrying Ellen Casey and having ten children before dying in Brisbane aged 81 in February 1914. He is buried at the Toowong Cemetery. The fate of Rigby’s two eldest sons is less certain. ‘Robert Crawford or Rigby’, as his name was recorded at the time of his birth, married a ticket-of-leave convict, Mary Kay per John Renwick, in Sydney in August 1845. The following year, Hannah placed an advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald seeking news of second son, Samuel Rigby, who had not been heard from and was ‘supposed to be in the interior’. He may have died in Brisbane in 1853. It seems that neither Robert or Samuel Rigby had children, leaving the Hexton line, descended from Hannah’s youngest son Jimmy Hexton, as Hannah Rigby’s only Australian descendants.

Citation

Jan Richardson and Lee Butterworth, ‘Hannah Rigby (c. 1794 -1853)’, Harry Gentle Resource Centre, Griffith University, 2021 (last updated 2023), https://harrygentle.griffith.edu.au/life-stories/hannah-rigby/.