On a Saturday night in January 1844, a widow named Ellen Jamieson was keeping her little shop open late on the corner of Kent Street and Margaret Place in Sydney. Her two young children were asleep upstairs. Just before midnight a man came in asking for vinegar, and a few minutes later a neighbour across the road heard a terrible noise from inside. The man was John Knatchbull, a former Royal Navy commander from one of the best-known families in Kent, by then a ticket-of-leave convict with a long record behind him. Ellen died of her injuries twelve days later. Knatchbull was tried, found guilty, and on 13 February 1844 he became the first man hanged at the new Darlinghurst Gaol, in front of one of the biggest crowds Sydney had ever seen.
I've mentioned Knatchbull briefly in my post on Darlinghurst Gaol & Darlinghurst Court, and he heads the list in my page on the Hangings at Darlinghurst Gaol, but his story deserves a page of its own. It takes in a baronet's household in Kent, the Napoleonic Wars, a pickpocketing charge at Vauxhall Gardens, the Bathurst road, Norfolk Island, and finally a courtroom where his barrister tried a defence no colonial judge had heard before. Most of all, though, it is about Ellen Jamieson and the two children she left behind, and I've tried to keep them in view the whole way through.
A Baronet's Son from Kent
Even Knatchbull's birth year isn't settled. The Australian Dictionary of Biography gives "1792?" and says he was probably the John Knatchbull baptised on 24 January 1793 at Norton, near Provender, in Kent. His biographer Colin Roderick, whose 1963 book is the standard account, puts his birth in 1789. The plate on his coffin in 1844 read "aged fifty-six". So take your pick, but somewhere between about 1787 and 1793.
His father was Sir Edward Knatchbull (1758–1819), 8th Baronet, of Mersham Hatch in Kent, and his mother was Sir Edward's second wife, Frances, daughter of Thomas Graham. The ADB describes Sir Edward as "a rollicking squire who married three times and had at least twenty children". John was a younger son in a very crowded house. According to Roderick (as summarised on Wikipedia), his mother died in 1799, and the children were left in the care of a governess. He went to school at Ashford and later to Dr Charles Burney's school at Greenwich, and the ADB says he also went to Winchester.
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When Sir Edward died in 1819 the baronetcy went to John's elder half-brother, also Sir Edward Knatchbull, who followed his father into Parliament. That half-brother's name will come up again, right at the end of the story, on the papers found in John's pockets.
The Navy, and How It Ended
In August 1804, as a boy, Knatchbull joined the Royal Navy as a volunteer, the usual way in for a gentleman's younger son. Over the next few years he served in a string of ships: the ADB lists the Ardent, Revenge, Zealand, Sybille, Téméraire, Leonidas, Cumberland, Ocean and Ajax. He passed his lieutenant's examination in November 1810 and served in the Shearwater off Spain until he was invalided home in August 1812.
In December 1813 he was commissioned to command the sloop Doterel in the West Indies, but he missed the ship. Roderick's research found that he went down with yellow fever in Barbados while trying to catch up with her. He was reappointed to the Doterel in September 1814, and in 1815 he brought her from Bermuda by way of the Azores back to Portsmouth. Then came Waterloo, the navy was cut back hard, and Knatchbull was retired on half-pay.
What finished his naval career wasn't a battle. It was a wine bill. While the Doterel was at the Azores in April 1815 he had run up a debt with the British vice-consul at Fayal, Thomas Parkin, and the bills he gave in payment were not honoured. Parkin complained to the Admiralty, and in 1818, as the ADB puts it, his pay "was stopped by the Admiralty because of a debt he had incurred in the Azores". Roderick found that the Admiralty decided his "conduct was unbecoming the character of an officer" and took his name off the navy list. I couldn't find any record of a court-martial. For what it's worth, the Sydney paper The Australian told a different story in 1844, claiming he was dismissed from the service for tyranny. I've found nothing in the official record to back that up.
"John Fitch" at Vauxhall Gardens
Not much is known about his life between 1818 and 1824. In his own memoir he claimed he fought in South America, but there's no proof of it. What is certain is that on the evening of 30 June 1824, at a crowded fireworks night at Vauxhall Gardens in London, a gentleman named de Dompierre found that his coat pocket had been cut and his pocket-book taken. A man calling himself John Fitch was already in police hands on suspicion of picking pockets, and he had a blank cheque and several sovereigns on him.
"Fitch" was tried at the Surrey Assizes in Guildford in August 1824. The ADB and The Times report give the date as 21 August, while the ship's muster for the convict transport (quoted by Museums of History NSW) says 19 August. The Times reported that the judge, Justice Burrough, "perfectly knew who" the prisoner really was. He was found guilty of what the ADB calls "stealing with force and arms" and was sentenced to transportation for fourteen years.
Transported to New South Wales
Knatchbull sailed on the convict ship Asia and arrived in Sydney in April 1825; Roderick gives the date as 29 April. He was sent to Bathurst, where official records called him "John Fitch" or "John Fitch, alias Knatchbull". In November 1826 he was made a constable to the mail service, carrying the mail on foot between Bathurst and Mount York. He was given a ticket-of-leave on 24 August 1829 after helping to catch eight runaway convicts. His ticket was then moved to Liverpool, and by 1831 he was an overseer on the Parramatta Road.
For a while it looked as if he might settle down. He didn't. In December 1831 he paid for clothes at Charles Bailey's shop in George Street with a cheque signed, supposedly, by Judge James Dowling. The cheque was a forgery. Bailey later spotted him in the market and had him arrested. On 22 February 1832 the Supreme Court found him guilty and sentence of death was recorded against him. It was commuted to seven years at Norfolk Island.
Norfolk Island: Poison and Mutiny
Knatchbull spent several months on the prison hulk Phoenix in Sydney Harbour before sailing for Norfolk Island on the Governor Phillip in October 1832. During the voyage some of the convicts plotted to poison the crew and guards and seize the ship, with Knatchbull, the one man aboard who could navigate, meant to sail her to South America. The plot was betrayed and failed. The ADB records it simply as "a conspiracy... to poison the ship's company".
On the island he had a stroke in 1833 that left him partly paralysed. In January 1834, when a large group of convicts rose against the guards, Knatchbull said he was too ill to take part, though he had offered to command a ship if they captured one. When the rising was put down, he turned informer for the acting commandant, Captain Foster Fyans. At the trials that followed, twenty-nine men were sentenced to death, and the judge, William Burton, gave Fyans a serve for taking Knatchbull's confession. The ADB quotes him:
"He was the chief of the mutineers, the man you should have named first in the Calendar. You have saved his life, or prolonged it. He never can do good."
Keep Justice Burton in mind. Ten years later, he would be the judge at Knatchbull's murder trial.
Port Macquarie, the Ticket-of-Leave, and Back to Sydney
Knatchbull's Norfolk Island sentence came on top of his original fourteen years, so when he got back to Sydney in May 1839 he still had time to serve. He was in poor health and was sent to Port Macquarie as an invalid. Roderick says he was later put in charge of the punt across the Hastings River. On 8 July 1842 he received a new ticket-of-leave, and in July 1843 it was altered to Sydney so he could work on the coaster Harriet for its owner, Thomas Lewis.
By the end of 1843 Lewis was insolvent and Knatchbull was out of work. He was lodging with Charles Hollowell in Clarence Lane, and he told Hollowell he owned the Harriet and was only waiting for her to be sold to pay his rent. He had also become engaged to a young widow named Harriet Craig, who had introduced him to Hollowell as a free man. The wedding was very close. His barrister said in court that it was to be the next morning; The Dispatch, as quoted by the Dictionary of Sydney, said the Monday. Either way, he had no money to pay for it.
Saturday Night, 6 January 1844
Ellen Jamieson ran a small shop from her home on the corner of Kent Street and Margaret Place, a few streets back from the harbour. That's how the Sydney Morning Herald described the location in its trial report. The Dictionary of Sydney puts her home in Erskine Street, which is close by, but I've gone with the address given in the 1844 papers. She had been widowed just over a year earlier, when her husband Robert, a steward on the Rose steamer and a native of Glasgow, died in December 1842. She had two small children, Mary, known as Polly, and Robert, known as Bobby. Her age isn't certain: the Herald reporter at the inquest thought she was about 30, while Wikipedia, citing her NSW death record, gives 35. Neighbours said she did a good trade, and one woman told the inquest that Ellen often changed banknotes for her. People knew she had money in the house.
John Shalless, a builder who lived opposite in Margaret Place, wasn't well that night. At about ten o'clock his wife warned him that a boy had seen a suspicious-looking man hanging about. Shalless went out onto his verandah and watched him walk up and down outside Mrs Jamieson's shop for more than an hour and a half. He saw the man go in and out, sit on the kerb, and throw something at her little white dog. At about twenty to twelve a customer, Mrs Elizabeth Brown, went into the shop and found a man behind the door "getting some vinegar". He bade them both good night and left.
A few minutes later Ellen came to her door, wiping her hands, and the man stepped up, spoke to her and followed her in, pushing the door shut behind him. Shalless told his wife, "I hope he does not mean to rob her." Then he heard the door slam and something fall. He ran across the road and found the door locked, and from inside he heard what he described as "some strokes given as of some one breaking a cocoanut with a hammer". He saw a light moving upstairs and the man pulling back the blind to look out.
Shalless asked a private watchman for help and was told, "Well, what is that to me?" So he roused the neighbours himself. While some watched the front, others broke in the back door. They found Ellen lying unconscious and bleeding heavily from wounds to her head, and the man standing behind the front door. He didn't fight. As they grabbed him he called out, "O! don't strike me." Constable Bryan Norton took him to the watch-house. Upstairs, the neighbours found Ellen's two children in bed, crying.
The weapon took a while to find. About two hours later Mrs Jaques, a neighbour, lifted the mattress on Ellen's bed and found a tomahawk hidden between the mattress and the battens, with fresh blood on it. Charles Hollowell knew it at once. It was his, and it had been lying in his back yard, where his lodger could get at it.
At the station Inspector Molloy searched the prisoner. In his trousers and pockets were a woman's pocket, which looked as if it had been torn from her clothes, and money totalling £17 2s 8d. He also had three bills of exchange for £50 each, made out to be drawn on his half-brother, Sir Edward Knatchbull, along with three blank ones. There was blood on his trousers and on his boots.
Twelve Days
Ellen Jamieson didn't die that night. The surgeon, Mr Jones, found several fractures of her skull. Her neighbours nursed her for twelve days, and she died between seven and eight o'clock on the morning of Thursday 18 January 1844. Mrs Brown, who used to do her mangling and mending, was with her at the end.
The inquest was held the same day at M'Kenzie's public house on the corner of Clarence Street and Margaret Place. Knatchbull was there and cross-examined the witnesses himself. The jury took about a minute to return a verdict of wilful murder, and the coroner made a point of praising Shalless "for the praiseworthy manner in which he had acted". The Herald said four or five hundred people waited outside. When Knatchbull was bundled into a hackney coach to go back to gaol, the crowd hooted and hissed.
The Trial: 24 January 1844
Knatchbull came to trial in the Supreme Court only six days after the inquest, on Wednesday 24 January 1844, before Justice William Burton, the same judge who had dealt with him on Norfolk Island. The Attorney-General, John Plunkett, prosecuted. His barrister was Robert Lowe, a newcomer to the colony who would later become a well-known figure in British politics.
Lowe started on the indictment itself. Knatchbull had been charged as "John Fitch alias John Knatchbull", and Lowe objected to the name. The court amended the indictment to "John Knatchbull" only, and he pleaded not guilty. Lowe then asked for the trial to be put off, saying a settler from the Clarence River named John Tattersal could give Knatchbull an alibi. Justice Burton refused, as the affidavit didn't say clearly what Tattersal could prove.
The Crown's witnesses told the same story they had told at the inquest. Then Lowe did something unusual. He didn't really argue that Knatchbull hadn't done it. Instead he told the jury that even if every witness was right, Knatchbull was one of those people "for whom laws had not been made". Insanity, he said, could affect the will without touching the intellect, so that a man could know perfectly well what he was doing and still be driven to it by something he couldn't resist. He pointed to the recent M'Naghten case in England. He asked how a man born into a noble family, with every advantage, could have "fallen, step by step, into the lowest depths of disgrace, unless urged on by some resistless demon of insanity". And he asked why a man about to be married would do such a thing, when he had bills on his brother in his pocket that he could have cashed.
This was what came to be called the plea of "moral insanity". The ADB says Lowe raised it "for the first time in a British court", and the Dictionary of Sydney calls it the first time insanity ideas like these were tested in an Australian court. What we do know for sure is what Justice Burton said. He told the jury it was "the first time he (the Judge) had ever heard a doctrine of this kind broached in a Court of Justice", and that it had no place in the law of England, "nor... either in common sense or morality". Lowe had no witnesses to back it up. The two men he called, the Colonial Surgeon Patrick Harnett and a priest who had known Knatchbull in 1817 and 1818, both said they had never been in a position to judge his state of mind.
On motive, Burton told the jury that the money found on the prisoner, if they believed it came from Ellen's house and person, gave them "a probable motive for his conduct". In other words, robbery.
Verdict and Sentence
The jury found him guilty without even leaving the box. Asked if he had anything to say, Knatchbull spoke of his upbringing and his naval service, claiming he had been in "twenty-one general engagements" and received "eleven wounds", and asked whether such a man would murder "a defenceless woman". Justice Burton sentenced him to death. He told Knatchbull that he had complained of too little time to prepare for his trial, yet he had given the woman he killed far less time to prepare for hers before her Maker.
Before the court rose, Plunkett suggested that the money found on Knatchbull should go to Ellen's children, and Burton agreed to recommend that it be placed in the Savings Bank for them. He also had harsh words for the police, who hadn't marked the tomahawk or the pocket as evidence, and for the watchman who had refused to help. "The public were mainly indebted to Mr. Shalless," he said.
The Appeal and the Plea for Mercy
Lowe wasn't finished. A few days after the trial he went back to the Supreme Court arguing that the sentence was illegal, because the judge hadn't directed that Knatchbull's body be dissected after execution (or, as Wikipedia summarises the petition, buried within the prison). The ADB says the appeal failed, and Wikipedia says the judges gave their decision on 1 February 1844.
There was one more try. According to Roderick, an attorney named Parry Long put a submission to the Governor, Sir George Gipps, on 8 February asking that a petition go to Queen Victoria. On 10 February Knatchbull was told it had failed. The Australian also reported that his two nephews in Sydney had kept him supplied with comforts in gaol and had "used every exertion" to save him. The Sheriff's Office, meanwhile, was writing to the Colonial Secretary on 6 February asking for extra armed guards for the execution. That letter is now in the NSW State Archives collection.
The Confession
Right up to the last weekend, Knatchbull denied the murder. Then he signed a short written confession, which The Australian printed:
"Condemned Cell, Woolloomooloo Gaol, 10th February, 1844. In the name of the Almighty God, Amen. I am guilty of the horrid deed for which I am to suffer death; and may the Lord have mercy on my soul. Amen. JOHN KNATCHBULL."
The papers didn't agree on exactly when or to whom he confessed. The Australian linked it to the "condemned sermon" on the Sunday, while The Dispatch said he confessed fully to Henry Keck, the keeper of the gaol, on the Monday night. The Dispatch added that he said he could not account for what had driven him to it. He also spent his last weeks writing the story of his life, finishing it on the morning of his execution and handing the manuscript to the gaol's governor.
13 February 1844: The Hanging at Darlinghurst
The gaol at Darlinghurst had only been taking prisoners since 1841, and Knatchbull was the first man hanged there, and the first to go to a gallows built outside its walls, in full public view. Hangings had been public in Sydney for decades, but this was a new stage for them. The Dispatch said it stood "in front of the north gate", on ground so high it "could be seen from almost any part of Sydney". The ADB entry for the hangman puts it "outside the main gate". In my Darlinghurst Gaol post I placed the early public hangings at the main gate on Forbes Street.
People began walking across the Racecourse (today's Hyde Park) from six in the morning: men, women and children, on foot and in carts and carriages. Mounted police and soldiers kept the crowd back behind a chain. The crowd figures vary even within a single newspaper. The Australian's main report estimated "about ten thousand", but a second account printed in the same issue reckoned "between four and five thousand". Later writers, including the Dictionary of Sydney, have gone with more than ten thousand. Either way, it was an enormous number of people for a town the size of Sydney in 1844.
Just before nine the Sheriff, Keck and Captain Innes went to the condemned cell. Knatchbull walked out between the gaol chaplain, the Rev. Mr Elder, and the Rev. Mr Sharpe of Bathurst, joining in the burial service as it was read. He was dressed in a mourning suit with black gloves and held a white handkerchief. At the foot of the scaffold he knelt and prayed for about five minutes. Then he climbed up, helped by the executioner, Alexander Green, the colony's long-serving hangman. The ADB entry on Green calls this the most famous of the executions he carried out at Darlinghurst.
The cap was drawn over his face. The Australian heard him saying, "Lord have mercy on my soul! Christ have mercy on my soul!" when the bolt was drawn. The two papers don't agree about what happened next. The Australian's second account suggests death came quickly, but The Dispatch reported that the knot had slipped round to the back of his neck, "and the struggles of expiring strength were long and painful". Both said the crowd was quiet throughout. There was no jeering, and afterwards people simply went home.
Afterwards
Before his body was handed over to his family, a cast was taken of his head and face "for phrenological purposes", watched by many of Sydney's doctors. On 28 February The True Sun printed a woodcut of the cast. Early on the Wednesday morning a hearse and mourning coach took the coffin to what The Dispatch called "the Dissenting burial ground". The plate on it read "John Knatchbull, aged fifty-six". The Rev. Dr Ross of the Independent Chapel read the service. The mourners were two gentlemen and two ladies in deep mourning, and one more woman in black who stood apart from them.
What Became of Ellen Jamieson's Children
This is the part of the story I find hardest to read. Polly and Bobby Jamieson had lost their father in December 1842 and their mother in January 1844. A committee was formed to collect money for them, and its members included the Presbyterian minister Dr John Dunmore Lang and John Shalless, the neighbour who had raised the alarm. Lists for donations were left at the banks and on board the Hunter's River steamer.
Then, on 8 March 1844, Robert Lowe, Knatchbull's own barrister, applied to the Supreme Court to be made the children's guardian. The application was unopposed and was granted by the Chief Justice, Sir James Dowling, the same judge whose name Knatchbull had forged on that cheque back in 1831. Lang was furious that the man who had tried to save the murderer was now raising the victim's children, and he attacked Lowe in print.
The children lived in the Lowe household, and Wikipedia's account, drawing on Lowe's biographers, says their place there was somewhere between adopted children and servants. When the Lowes sailed for England on the Kate in January 1850, Polly and Bobby went with them. After that the accounts don't agree. A biography of Lowe from 1893 says Polly died young, soon after reaching England, and that Bobby went on to serve in New Zealand. A later biography from 1976 says Bobby died young in an asylum, and that Polly probably married and came back to Australia. I can't tell you which is right, and I'd rather leave it there than guess.
How Sydney Remembered Him
Sydney couldn't get enough of the story at the time. In the days before the execution a King Street printer advertised a lithograph of "John Knatchbull, the Murderer; and Mrs. Ellen Jamieson, his Victim" for a shilling. The Sydney Morning Herald grumbled that "the sooner he is forgotten the better". Four days after the hanging a booklet called The Life of J. Knatchbull was on sale, and the State Library of NSW still holds a copy. Roderick later wrote that many of the versions that followed painted Knatchbull "as a monster of bloody appetites". His own manuscript life story was eventually published in Roderick's 1963 biography, John Knatchbull: From Quarterdeck to Gallows. More than fifty years on, in 1897, the Truth newspaper was still printing pictures of his scaffold.
For the law, Lowe's "moral insanity" defence is still the part people write about, and it has been studied as an early attempt to bring that idea into an Australian courtroom. For Darlinghurst, Knatchbull was the first of the many people hanged at the gaol. The walls are still there in Forbes Street, and these days they're full of art students rather than prisoners.
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For me, the people worth remembering from that Saturday night are John Shalless, who wouldn't look away when the watchman did, the neighbours who broke down the back door, the women who nursed Ellen for twelve days, and Ellen Jamieson herself, a hard-working widow trying to keep a roof over two little children in 1840s Sydney.
Timeline
- c.1789–1793 – John Knatchbull born in Kent; the ADB says probably baptised at Norton on 24 January 1793, while Roderick gives 1789.
- August 1804 – Joins the Royal Navy as a volunteer.
- November 1810 – Passes his lieutenant's examination.
- 1814–1815 – Commands the sloop Doterel; retired on half-pay after Waterloo.
- 1818 – Half-pay stopped over the Azores debt, and his name is removed from the navy list.
- 30 June 1824 – Arrested at Vauxhall Gardens, London, as "John Fitch".
- August 1824 – Convicted at the Surrey Assizes and sentenced to fourteen years' transportation.
- April 1825 – Arrives in Sydney on the Asia; sent to Bathurst.
- 24 August 1829 – First ticket-of-leave.
- 22 February 1832 – Convicted of forging Judge Dowling's name; death recorded, commuted to seven years on Norfolk Island.
- October 1832 – Poison plot on the Governor Phillip fails.
- January 1834 – Norfolk Island rising; Knatchbull turns informer.
- May 1839 – Returns to Sydney; later sent to Port Macquarie.
- 8 July 1842 – New ticket-of-leave, altered to Sydney in July 1843.
- Saturday 6 January 1844 – Ellen Jamieson attacked in her shop near midnight; Knatchbull caught inside.
- Thursday 18 January 1844 – Ellen Jamieson dies; inquest returns wilful murder.
- Wednesday 24 January 1844 – Trial before Justice Burton; guilty; sentenced to death.
- 1 February 1844 – Appeal over the wording of the sentence rejected.
- 10 February 1844 – Petition for mercy fails; written confession signed.
- Tuesday 13 February 1844 – Hanged outside Darlinghurst Gaol.
- 8 March 1844 – Robert Lowe appointed guardian of the Jamieson children.
- January 1850 – The Lowes leave for England with Polly and Bobby.
Sources
- Australian Dictionary of Biography, "Knatchbull, John (1792–1844)", Vol. 2, 1967: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/knatchbull-john-2313
- Ken Macnab, "Green, Alexander (1802–?)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, Supplementary Volume, 2005: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/green-alexander-12949
- Australian Dictionary of Biography, "Lowe, Robert (1811–1892)": https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lowe-robert-2376
- Museums of History NSW, "Convict case study – John Knatchbull": https://mhnsw.au/stories/general/convict-case-study-john-knatchbull/
- Museums of History NSW, "John Knatchbull" (Convict Sydney): https://mhnsw.au/stories/convict-sydney/john-knatchbull/
- Rachel Franks, "A huge crowd for a hanging: the end of John Knatchbull", Dictionary of Sydney blog, 2021: https://dictionaryofsydney.org/blog/a_huge_crowd_for_a_hanging_the_end_of_john_knatchbull
- Wikipedia, "John Knatchbull (Royal Navy officer)" (summarising Colin Roderick, John Knatchbull: From Quarterdeck to Gallows, 1963): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Knatchbull_(Royal_Navy_officer)
- "Death" (Robert Jamieson), Sydney Morning Herald, 20 December 1842, p. 3: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12423195
- "Domestic Intelligence", Weekly Register (Sydney), 13 January 1844, p. 373: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/228135480
- "Inquests", Sydney Morning Herald, 19 January 1844, p. 2: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12412784
- "Supreme Court – Criminal Side", Sydney Morning Herald, 25 January 1844, p. 2: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12411912
- "Criminal Sessions", Sydney Record, 27 January 1844, p. 131: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/228141580
- Advertisement, "John Knatchbull, the Murderer; and Mrs. Ellen Jamieson, his Victim", Sydney Morning Herald, 6 February 1844, p. 3: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12426132
- "Execution of John Knatchbull", The Australian, 15 February 1844, p. 3: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/37123826
- "Execution of John Knatchbull the Murderer of Mrs. Jamison", The Dispatch, 17 February 1844, p. 2: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/228250767
- "Funeral of Knatchbull", The Dispatch, 17 February 1844, p. 3: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/228250769
- "The Late Mrs. Jamison" (subscription committee notice), Sydney Morning Herald, 17 February 1844, p. 3: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12422462
- "Cast of Knatchbull's Head", The True Sun and New South Wales Independent Press, 28 February 1844, p. 154: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/228133935
- "Law Intelligence – In the Matter of the Orphans Jamieson", Sydney Morning Herald, 9 March 1844, p. 2: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12415103
- National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, "Robert Lowe, Viscount Sherbrooke": https://portrait.gov.au/people/robert-lowe-1811
- All images: Wikimedia Commons, with the original holding institutions credited under each picture.