DA COSTA, Benjamin Mendes
b. London, 1803–1868
Fairlie, 1840; Free.
Merchant.
Benjamin Da Costa and his sister Louisa (q.v.) appeared in the South Australian Census of 1841. He lived at Kermode Street in Adelaide. He was also listed as a merchant of Hindley Street in the 1841 South Australian Almanack. In 1843 he had moved to Grenfell Street. He gave three guineas to the building fund of the Trinity Church and kept his distance from the Jewish community. Da Costa left South Australia in 1848 and lived in London until his death on 26 November 1868. He left a large bequest to St Peter's College in Adelaide.
South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register, 4 January 1845.
DA COSTA, Louisa
Fairlie, 1840; Free.
Single.
The sister of Benjamin Mendes Da Costa (q.v.), Louisa appeared with her brother in the 1841 South Australian Census. Louisa da Costa died in England in February 1898 leaving £7624 to the Adelaide Public Hospital.
DANIELS, Daniel
b. 1761
Scarborough, 1788; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1784.
Single; 2 children.
Daniel Daniels stole a copper pot, a pewter dish and a pair of shoes from Joseph Solomon. He was chased by a watchman, dropped the goods in an alley and was only picked up by the police and identified six days later. He remained in custody on the Censor hulk until rounded up and sent on the First Fleet.
Daniels was sent on the Sirius to Norfolk Island, arriving on 13 March 1790 and remaining there until 1796. He was sentenced to thirty-two lashes in May 1791 for stealing flour from Mary Limamon (Lammerman). By 21 April 1792 he was ‘off stores’ and working for settlers on the island. In May 1794 he was hired for a twelve-month contract by Owen Cavenaugh. Daniels was at Norfolk Island in 1796, after which the official records have no more information. There is, however, a curious English record of Daniels' presence in Sydney in the year following the arrival of the First Fleet. A Gloucester newspaper of 1789 reported that a Mr Ephraim Daniel, a Jew, of Mile End, had received a letter from a friend in Holland concerning ‘your unfortunate relation who left you with the transports for Botany Bay’, informing him that his relation
was well in February last. He has settled at Port Jackson and has leave to teach the children of some of your nation to read and write Hebrew, your nephew has two children and says all that are born there are very healthy and more born than are buried or hanged of grown people if there were enough of your people they might have a place for themselves. Norfolk Isle is so thinly inhabited that it is not worth a stranger's while to settle there'.
In 2008 the distinguished historian Geoffey Blainey published an account of the exploration of the Pacific and may have solved the mystery of Daniel Daniels' ‘leave’ to teach ‘the children of some of your nation to read and write Hebrew’ when there was only one Jewish child in the colony. Blainey explains there was a widely believed myth that somewhere in the Pacific was a continent of lost Jews who spoke Hebrew. It was reasoned that in the absence of a large landmass in the Southern Hemisphere the world itself would topple over.
OBSP, 1783–84, case 556, p. 765; HO 10/6; M. Gillen, The Founders of Australia, p. 94; Ruth Campbell, RAHS Journal. vol. 68, no. 3, p. 1697; Morris Forbes, ‘The First Fleet Convict—Daniel Daniels’, Great Synagogue Journal (Sydney), December 1987, quoting Gloucester Journal, 14 December 1789, Geoffrey Blainey, Sea of Dangers, Captain Cook and his Rivals, Viking an imprint of Penguin Books, Australia, 2008.
DANIELS, John
b. Gibraltar, 1794
Fame, 1817; Convict; Sentenced to life, Middlesex, 1816.
Confectioner; Height: 161 cm.
Dark complexion, black hair, black eyes. A pickpocket. Jew. John Daniels had been a member of a gang of three boys who stole a watch in the Strand.
On 14 March 1817, on disembarkation, Daniels was sent on to Liverpool. Following bad behaviour Daniels was sent to Newcastle on 11 May 1819. On 18 May 1822 Daniels, a servant to John Butcher, who was a district constable in Sydney, was returned to government employ. In the 1822 General Muster of New South Wales John Daniels was an assigned convict servant to his co-religionist Aaron Barnett (q.v.) of Sydney, but was officially noted as absent from employment from September 1823 to January 1825, and probably escaped from Australia.
Ship Indent 4/4005, p. 246; Sydney Gazette, 13 January 1825.
Fair complexion, very dark brown hair, large nose, large dimpled chin. The Letters CB and a dot were tattooed on his right arm. He had a scar over his left eye.
Joseph Daniels arrived in Hobart Town on 20 August 1843 and was released from road-gang work on 13 November 1845. He received his ticket of leave on 28 November 1848. His certificate of freedom was issued on 23 August 1852.
CON 33/40.
DANIELS, Moses
b. London, 1797–1867
Glory, 1818; Convict; Sentenced to life, Old Bailey, 1818.
Single; Smith and groom; Height: 175 cm.
Pale sallow dark complexion, brown hair, hazel eyes. Jew. Moses Daniels and John Smith (both aged twenty) stole bedclothes and clothes from a London lodging house. Information was laid against them and they were caught in possession of the goods on the same day (24 December 1817). On 18 February 1818 they were both sentenced to death.
The convict transport ship Glory arrived in Port Jackson on 14 September 1818. Daniels was sent to the prison settlement at Newcastle and punished with twenty-five lashes in February 1820 ‘For entering the dwelling place of John Ladone during government hours with intent to steal’. On 22 September 1822 Moses Daniels was sent as an assigned convict servant to Windsor. The Sydney Gazette announced on 17 March 1825 that there was a letter waiting for him at the General Post Office. The 1828 Census erroneously recorded that he was thirty-four years old and working as a labourer at John Blaxland's, Newington. His mother, ‘Catharine Daniels’ of 2 Midford Place, Tottenham Court Road, wrote (in January 1824) to the Governor of New South Wales asking for mercy on behalf of her son:
Your Petitioner's only son Moses Daniels 5 years under your Jurisdiction has in his letter whom your Petitioner very lately received expressed his utmost satisfaction from the humane and beneficent treatment he has received for which he is deeply thankful to beg your Honour would graciously mitigate his sentence and thereby to alleviate her various feeling for an only child.
The petition had little effect. Daniels was given a ticket of leave in 1833 for the Parramatta District, and a conditional pardon on 1 August 1840. He was listed in Parramatta on the General Returns of Convicts in 1837, aged thirty-six (he was actually forty). On 10 October 1838, the Rev. Dickinson at the Hill of Mars officiated at his marriage to Eleanor Gunn, aged forty-five, who had come to the colony as a convict on the Fanny (2) in 1833. His death was registered in 1867 at Parramatta.
OBSP, 1817–18, case 177, p. 69; Ship Indent 4/4006; CS 4/1872, p. 36; Newcastle, Monthly Return of Punishments, 1810–1825, 4/1718, no. 1394; Prisons Department, Parramatta Gaol Entrance Books, 1836–1838, 4/6532; Permission to Marry Book 4/4510; TL 33/84, 39/433; CP 41/154, 4/4127 (April 1839); HO 10/52.
DAVIES, David
b. London, 1823–1836
1832; Free.
The son of Michael John Davies and his wife Hannah (qq.v.), David came to Australia with his mother and siblings. He was the brother of Edward Davis (q.v.), the bushranger, and John Davies (q.v.) of Hobart Town. David was thirteen years old when he died. Strangely, the boy's tombstone at Port Macquarie, which is dated 1836, reads in Hebrew: ‘The youth David the son of Meir’. Yet the first name in Hebrew carved on the tombstone of Michael John Davies is ‘Michael’.
Sidney Schultz, ‘Early Jewish Settlers in Port Macquarie’, AJJHS, vol. 3, no. 8 (1953), p. 345.
DAVIES, George Louis Asher
b. Melbourne, 1834
The son of Michael John and Hannah Davies (qq.v.), George Davies briefly occupied seat no. 65 in the Hobart Synagogue in 1845. He became the publisher of a newspaper in Windsor, New South Wales, called the Australian. He married Arabella Mills in Sydney in 1856.
DAVIES, Hannah
1832; Free.
Married; 8 children.
The wife of Michael John Davies (q.v.), Hannah came to Australia in 1832, following her convict husband, who had been transported in 1830. Her English-born children were Ann, John (q.v), Edward (Davis, q.v.), Frances, and David (q.v.). George Louis Asher (q.v.), Jane and Sophia were born in Australia.
DAVIES, John
b. London Free.
Married; 3 children.
John and his wife, Katherine Sarah (née Salom) Davies (q.v.), came to Van Diemen's Land as free settlers in 1840 and settled in Broadmarsh, where they had a ‘small well stocked farm’. On 11 July 1844, a writ was served against Davies by a Thomas Christian for £41 4s 1d and a levy was imposed next day on three horses, seven bullocks and some furniture at his farm, called the Glebe, at New Norfolk. The property was to be sold but on the day before the sale, Reuben Joseph (q.v.) appeared and said the property belonged to him. The sheriff wrote that there was ‘great suspicion’ attached to the claim. The two men claimed to be brothers-in-law and had used the same manoeuvre on ‘other occasions’ in the past. The sheriff felt that Reuben Joseph was ‘unkennelling fraud’ on his office. Joseph commenced an action of trespass in the Supreme Court, causing financial risk to the sheriff and ‘heavy expense’. In the end, Joseph was forced to pay £132 4s 1d.
The Davies family then moved to live in High Street in the town of New Norfolk, where John was listed as a shopkeeper in the 1848 Census. John and Sarah's children were Maurice Coleman (q.v.), born in London in 1835, Dinah and Benjamin. John paid one guinea to the Hobart Synagogue in 1845 and remained a seat holder for three years. He was then written off as a member for his failure to pay his dues.
CO 22/144/3060; AOT query 1963/257; CS 21 July 1843, Sheriff's Office A698.
DAVIES, John (DAVIS)
b. London, 1813–1872
Argyle, 1831; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1830.
Single; Second-class clerk; Height: 163 cm; 8 children.
Dark brown hair, oval face, grey eyes, no whiskers, long nose, large jutting out mouth, small chin. He was ‘orderly’ on board ship. Could read and write. Jew. John Davies was convicted, on 6 December 1830, on the charge of ‘False Pretences by ordering goods without authorisation’. His father was Michael John Davies (q.v.), managing clerk in an attorney's office in Fenchurch Street, who had been transported to New South Wales on the Florentia in 1830. His two brothers, Edward Davis (q.v.) and David Davies (q.v.), were at home. One sister, Ann, lived with her husband, Thomas Jones, a fruiterer, at Covent Garden. Three sisters lived with their father and mother.
John Davies arrived in Van Diemen's Land on 5 August 1831. He was one of the very few emancipists in Van Diemen's Land who gained sufficient influence to have his convict record torn from the ‘Black Books’ and destroyed. According to the slightly inaccurate ‘personal note’ in the Allport Collection, John Davies had been tried at the Clerkenwell Sessions and sentenced to seven years transportation for stealing a money order. His shipboard report from the surgeon, Dr Brock RN, gave the description: ‘incorrigible prisoner, uses bad language, employed on board as a barber’. Upon his arrival in Hobart Town he was assigned to the Commissariat Department, where he worked until January 1832. He was then assigned as a clerk to Francis Stephens Esq. of Sydney, and was taken to New South Wales in his service. His service had come to an abrupt conclusion when he briefly absconded with the wife of a ticket of leave holder who lived at Snug.
On 28 November 1832 John Davies arrived in Sydney from Port Macquarie as a prisoner to be sent to the Phoenix hulk to give evidence in a trial. He was then sent to the Hyde Park Prisoners' Barracks, ‘to be detained until the Governor's pleasure’. His behaviour was said to be ‘good’ and he was subsequently sent on to Port Macquarie to join his family, returning to Hobart Town to claim his ticket of leave. Davies wrote that his assignment was ‘contrary to the wishes of your petitioner. Your petitioner is quite a youth only now twenty years of age and he is necessitated to mix and associate with characters most depraved’. He asked that the Governor be ‘graciously pleased to [let him] be forwarded back to Van Diemen's Land to fulfil the remained [sic] of his sentence’.
Davies then began a career as a journalist and as an amateur actor. Records indicate that he arrived in Melbourne from Hobart on the Adelaide in October 1837, and he was frequently mentioned in theatrical performances—often with Michael Cashmore (q.v.). He briefly ran a fairly disreputable little establishment called the Imperial Hotel, but journalism and the theatre were his main passions. On 20 June 1842 he starred in the amateur theatrical production of The Queer Subject, in which he took the horrific role of ‘Bill Mattock—a notorious bone merchant’. Davies was described as ‘a chubby, red necked dark headed, unmistakably Jewish visaged personage; he had a whole family of brass in his face and was not only self assertive and cheeky’. He also began an odd job as a reporter for the Port Phillip Gazette. On 1 November 1840 Davies applied to become constable at Penrith at the salary of £80.
Davies resigned on 9 March 1841 and returned to Melbourne where he became well known for his many stage appearances. On 11 May 1842 he wrote about himself: ‘Mr Davis, reporter to the Port Phillip Gazette has as we are informed become the successful applicant for the appointment of Chief Constable of Portland Bay’. It was not to be; the report was false. In 1842 he wrote from the office of the Port Phillip Gazette to the Sydney office of the Colonial Secretary asking for a post in the Department of the Water Police. He was refused. He staged a benefit night for himself in June 1842. The Port Phillip Herald (14 June) thought that it must have been ‘highly remunerative’ but professed to be horrified when Davies ad libbed ‘in an unpardonable piece of “gagging” and imitated the blustering manner of a local magistrate’.
On 28 September 1842 the Port Phillip Gazette wrote:
Mr Davies, at present a reporter to this office, having engaged the Theatre for Thursday night next, will take a benefit on bidding farewell to the Melbourne stage. Mr Davies has been deservedly a favourite from his talents as an actor; and if his faults behind the curtain have involved him in censure, submission has expiated fully the failings which are common to human temper and human judgment.
The farewell was a great success. Davies made some £50 and played ‘with remarkable spirit’. More benefits and farewell performances followed. On 24 April 1843 the Port Phillip Patriot reported that he had attracted a ‘tolerably full house’, and that Davies, ‘despite his size, shuffled and snuffled very respectably as Sir Hector Homespun’. He returned to Melbourne with the amateur theatre company of Launceston for ‘An Unprecedented Theatrical Attraction’, to present yet another benefit involving the Melbourne and Tasmanian actors. The season that followed was successful and in August 1845 he asked for permission to reopen the Pavilion Theatre. The suggestion was bitterly opposed by the press and was compared to opening a brothel. Davies demanded an apology, which was readily given. However, he then traduced the wife of William Kerr, the publisher of the Port Phillip Herald, for a ‘false, foul and malicious attack’. He was found guilty of the offence, apologised profusely, was fined £15 and left for Hobart Town.
On 30 January 1847 John Davies was appointed chief constable of Wellington, New South Wales. He was constantly in trouble. Shortly after his appointment he was accused of ‘clandestinely obtaining a pair of trousers in Sydney’. He produced an ‘acceptable excuse’, and on 30 March 1847 he became ‘Inspector of Slaughter Houses’ and ‘Inspector of Weights and Measures’ for the towns of Montefiores and Wellington. As ‘Inspector of Distilleries’ on 8 April 1847, it was said that he had extorted a sum of money from John Smith before allowing Ann Melanger to be bailed out from prison. On 17 February 1848 the Sydney Chronicle reported that Chief Constable John Davies of Wellington had managed his own defence at the Sydney Police Court when he was charged with the assault and false imprisonment of Mrs Eleanor Richardson. He had been committed for trial and obliged to post two sureties of £40 each. Davies successfully pursued a libel case against the publisher Benjamin Isaacs (q.v.), who was fined and sent to prison for one month. The Melbourne Morning Herald commented (10 October 1849): ‘To parties here who know Davis's [sic] real character this sentence will excite more than mere surprise’. At the end of 1850 the Bathurst Free Press wrote, with heavy irony, about ‘the indefatigable, intelligent and praiseworthy late Chief Constable Mr Davies, who with his family, have left for the metropolis—gone absolutely gone!’ Davies, however, was not bound for Sydney. He returned to Van Diemen's Land, as Benjamin Isaacs, then editor of the Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal, reported (1 October 1851): ‘the pompous, impudent, bloated and unprincipled bully who formerly did the dirty work of the Bathurst Police Force is now luxuriating as emigration clerk at Launceston on 30 shillings a week, the inhabitants of which place are wonderfully surprised with the versatility of his genius’.
John Davies had married a non-Jewish woman on 16 December 1840, and on 24 February 1851, he wrote to the Board of the Hobart Hebrew Congregation from his home at 34 Patrick Street:
Sirs, I take leave at your desire, to forward this, my application to you, as ‘president’ of the Hebrew Congregation there to have my name registered as one of its members and also for apportioning to my use a seat in the Synagogue for the occupation of which I am prepared to subscribe the sum of £2 12s yearly by equal monthly payment. In making this formal application, I most emphatically protest against the right of the office bearers of the congregation … Although I most freely admit that whilst a Mr Jones, one of the persons holding office in the Synagogue gave me to understand I could not become one of its members because I had impinged the 39th law of the congregation but, at the same time, gravely informed me that I should not be turned out of the Synagogue when I chose to visit it!! And one which you, Sir, and the officers of the congregation should be pretty proud of!
Davies called the ruling a ‘gratuitous insult’ and then wrote:
I now come to the point of disqualification which I at once deny and for this very obvious reason, my marriage ‘contrary to the Judaical rites’ took place on 16 December 1840 whilst the laws of the congregation only came into operation on 30 June 1844 and therefore, as a matter of course, cannot in the slightest degree deny my undoubted right to become a member of the congregation for, I take it, these laws do not take a retrospective view.
As a consequence the Hobart congregation unanimously resolved on 2 March 1851 that ‘seat no. 156 [a place in the corner in the back row] be appropriated for the use of Mr John Davies whenever he be present in the Synagogue, but that the Committee decline any payment or pecuniary remuneration for the same’. Davies wrote an almost identical letter to the congregation on 25 May 1855, in which he stated ‘I am desirous of paying the highest amount usually subscribed’. He received no reply and evidently broke his links with the Jewish community.
Davies became the licensee of the Waterloo Hotel and Tap on the corner of Murray and Davey streets, Hobart, in 1852. Together with George Auber Jones, he then became the publisher of the Hobarton Guardian, which, in turn was incorporated in the Mercury on 5 July 1854. By September 1854 he had become the sole owner of the newspaper. He was elected to the House of Assembly as a member for Hobart in 1861, and then had to resign ‘through technical ineligibility’. He was returned to the House of Assembly as the member for Devon in 1862, and later briefly represented the electorate of Franklin. In October 1871 he retired from the Mercury. He died on 11 June 1872. The following day, the Mercury poetically commented that ‘a gloom overspread the city’. Davies, it was claimed, was ‘much misunderstood’ and ‘whatever he thought he said’. The Anglican funeral service was held in the pouring rain on 14 June 1872.
A far less sympathetic portrait of Davies is to be found in Peter Bolger's book, Hobart Town: ‘His reputation as emancipist, as Jew, as former publican and as actor was against him. His low class unpleasantly grating accent compromised his position in society’. Bolger adds that he was ‘more British than the Governor, more Anglican than the Bishop and more patriotically conservative than either’.
Davies had eight children; two of his sons, George and Charles Ellis, became leading citizens of Tasmania and both were knighted.
CON 14/2; Allport Collection, Letter from Alfred Nicholas; Argyle Indent, A1059.6, p. 353; Greater London Record Office, ref. MJ/SR 4240, ind. 4 & 5; Phoenix (hulk) Entrance Book 4/6282, no. 538; CS 4/2218, 33/4319; Port Phillip Gazette, 8 May 1841, 11 May 1842, 28 September 1842, 5 October 1842, 22 October 1845; ADB vol 4, pp27/8. Calder Papers, SLV, p. 399; CSO 22/2/342, SLV, 42/2302; 4/3851, 30 January 1847, 26 October 1847; Daily News, 5 October 1852, 28 June 1855, 5 July 1855; Hobart Town Advertiser, 16 June 1860, 23 July 1860; AG, pp. 126, 130, 244, 252–7, 283, 300, 303; Peter F. Bolger, Hobart Town, pp. 90, 91.
Katherine Sarah was the wife of John Davies (q.v.) and came with him to Van Diemen's Land in 1840. They had three children, Maurice Coleman (q.v.), Dinah and Benjamin.
DAVIES, Maurice Coleman
b. London, 1835–1913
1840; Free.
Single; 9 children.
Maurice Coleman Davies was born on 24 September 1835, the son of John and Katherine Davies (qq.v.). He was four years old when he arrived in Van Diemen's Land with his parents. He left the family farm at Broadmarsh in 1851 for the Blackwood goldfields in Victoria. After working as a merchant in Melbourne, he went to Adelaide in 1866 and was involved in large infrastructure works with the railways, water supply, wharves and docks. He was a general commission agent and merchant in Gilbert Place, and, by 1877, ran a business in Grenfell Street, Adelaide.
In 1875 M. C. Davies left his family in Adelaide and became a shareholder in several small milling companies in the southwest of Western Australia, and in 1877 took over a fifty-year lease to cut timber on 70 000 acres in the southwest. An additional lease of 46 000 acres expanded his ‘empire’. The family established itself at Karridale. At the height of his prosperity, Davies employed three hundred workers and was the dominant commercial force in the region, printing his own bank notes, which could be cashed at any bank in the colony of Western Australia. The timber blocks he exported were used to pave the roads of London and Melbourne. His firm was the contractor for the rebuilding of Princes Bridge in Melbourne, the Cape Leeuwin lighthouse and the railway from Adelaide to Melbourne. He acquired large pastoral holdings in the district of Katanning and, in 1881, expanded his holdings to the Kimberley region in the northwest of the colony.
On 24 March 1858 at the age of twenty-three, Davies had married Sarah Salom. Their children were Leama ‘Robert’ Judah (1 May 1859), Esther Hannah, who died at the age of six months in Adelaide on 11 June 1861, Katherine (Levi), (8 May 1864), Herbert (21 June 1865), Walter David ‘Karri’ (14 June 1867), Arthur Louis (6 December 1869), Miriam Florence (27 September 1872), Philip Vivian (22 February 1874), and Frank Benjamin (8 March 1875). Notable among his children was ‘Karri’ Davis, who settled in Natal Province in South Africa and became a (British) hero in the Boer War. He was captured at the siege of Mafeking, and later refused a knighthood and the Victoria Cross on the grounds that he was simply ‘doing his duty’.
M. C. Davies died at his home on St George Terrace, Perth, Western Australia, on 10 May 1913 at the age of seventy-seven. His sister was Dinah Tartakover of Sydney.
B. F. Hamling, Maurice Coleman Davies of Karridale and Liveringa, Pioneer Builder and Pastoralist 1835–1913; ‘M. C. Davies—Timber Tycoon’, Landscape, vol. 2, no. 1 (1967), pp. 10–15; Material held by the Augusta Museum (WA).
DAVIES, Michael John (DAVIS)
b. London, 1788–1873
Florentia (2), 1830; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Kent Quarter Sessions, 1830.
Married; Attorney's clerk; Height: 164.5 cm; 8 children.
Ruddy complexion. Dark brown to grey hair (bald). Hazel grey eyes. Mole on right cheek. Small scar on right side of forehead. Literate. Michael Davies was the son of Isaac Davis, and at twenty-two had married Hannah (née Benjamin) (q.v.). He worked in a lawyer's office in Fenchurch Street, London. He was sentenced at Maidstone on 15 July 1830 to seven years transportation for obtaining goods under false pretences. He was the father of Ann (1810), who married Thomas Jones, a fruiterer at Covent Garden, John (q.v.) (1813), Edward (Davis, q.v.) (1814), Frances (1820), David (q.v.) (1823), George Louis Asher (q.v.) (1834), Jane and Sophia.
Michael John Davies arrived in New South Wales on 15 December 1830 and worked as an assigned servant to Mr Richard Smith in Sydney until he ‘misbehaved’ and was sent to the Phoenix hulk. He was among fifty-nine ‘invalids and idiots’ sent on to Port Macquarie in 1832, though Davies is described as ‘a special’.
He was moved to Port Macquarie and soon set up in business for himself. His wife, Hannah Davies, and four of their children came out from England in 1832 and were able to join him at Port Macquarie. Their son David died there in 1836.
By 1838 Davies had begun to buy land at Port Macquarie and Newcastle. He held a publican's licence at Currabella in the District of Liverpool Plains, and applied for a publican's licence in Sydney. The Sydney licence, for the Family Hotel in George Street, was granted in 1839 and was transferred to a house in Pitt Street when his lease expired. A daughter of Michael John Davies and Hannah died on 16 June 1839 and was buried in the Devonshire Street Jewish Cemetery, Section D.
Davies moved to Newcastle and established a retail store at the corner of Watt and Scott streets. He ‘bought’ the Victoria, a steamer, with a promissory note worth £15, and in December 1840 was fined when Davies hit the owner of the ship when it was repossessed. Davies was in constant trouble—a great deal of which was self-inflicted. His application for a female assigned servant was refused by the magistrate, the Rev. C. P. N. Wilson, ‘on the grounds of morality and public decency and propriety’. He lodged a complaint about the quality of the flour supplied to convict workers by a commercial rival. George W. Jackson wrote to the police magistrate in Newcastle, defending himself, and charging that Davies:
is a trebly convicted scoundrel, who was turned out of Port Macquarie for repeated bad conduct—his son is the notorious Bush-Ranger lately captured by Mr Day, and it is more than suspected that Davis's house was a fence for those depredators—his house is also a Brothel by which he gains some support by the prostitution of his own daughters—is also a sly grog shop to the annoyance of many families here besides myself.
The accusations were unsubstantiated and the authorities took no action. It was certainly true that a man named Henry Denny, a business associate of Michael John Davies, was charged with having harboured the gang and that Denny was sent to Norfolk Island for fourteen years. However, Davies had been the Newcastle correspondent of Sydney's Commercial Journal, and on 31 October 1840 he had sent an article praising the bushranging gang just three weeks before his own son had joined the outlaws. Davies wrote: ‘The “gentlemen”conducted themselves in the most courteous manner possible—one rebuking another on passing any indecent observations, particularly in the hearing of females’.
On 19 February 1841, ‘M. D. of Sydney’ wrote to the Sydney Gazette advocating clemency for the six convicted bushrangers. The publication of the letter was delayed until 11 March 1841. Davies cleverly described the behaviour of the judge as ‘beyond all praise’. He wrote:
I was present this evening in the crowded court house when the awful sentence of death was passed upon the six convicted bushrangers, whose depredations on the Hunter have been so alarming and notorious. There are redeeming circumstances in the career of these men; they carefully in all their desperate proceedings, abstained from personal violence; their object was plunder. The Chief Justice, Sir James Dowling, whose general character and conduct is beyond all praise, and is approved of by the whole colony, will not be offended at the petition of humanity, which cries out against the commission of six more murders as a useless retribution for one. The wholesale execution of these men will be a disgrace to our society; it would certainly not take place in London.
Following the public execution of his son, Davies moved to Melbourne and later to Hobart Town. Davies became an original member of the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation, joining in April 1845 but failed to pay his dues. He was listed as a ‘clothier’ of Elizabeth Street in 1845, and worked for Michael Cashmore (q.v.). On 22 October 1845 Mr J. Davies informed ‘the settlers of Port Phillip that he has fitted up the “Union Hotel” near the wharf at Campbell St, Hobart Town’. In that first year of the Hobart Synagogue's life, Mr M. J. Davies rented seat no. 47. He pledged fourteen shillings, which he failed to pay.
That year, Davies moved back to Melbourne and became the licensee of the Shakespeare Hotel in Collins Street, providing it was run as a family hotel. On 25 August 1847 forty members of the Jewish community of Melbourne held a festive dinner at the hotel to celebrate the laying of the synagogue's foundation stone. Business in general was poor and by the end of the year he was in continual financial trouble. He was arrested as he attempted to leave the colony for Hobart Town while still owing a Mr E. M. Lord £38 10s. He returned to Sydney in 1847 n 1853 became the owner of a shop at 181 Pitt Street, which sold china and glass. In 1859, Bell's Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer described him as ‘The celebrated patriot and orator and crockery dealer’.
Davies is said to have published Devotions for Children and Private Jewish Families (Greville and Co., Bridge Street, 1867). The only recorded copy of this book is listed in the Mitchell Library, but appears to have been misplaced. Davies retired in 1883 and in 1888 purchased the Australian newspaper of Windsor, New South Wales, and appointed his son George to be editor. Hannah died in Sydney on 15 April 1866, ‘after a long and painful illness’ (Hobart Mercury, 25 May 1866). Michael John Davies, whose profession was given as ‘newspaper proprietor’, died at Windsor at the home of his son George. He was buried at the Devonshire Street Jewish Cemetery by the Rev. A. B. Davies on 27 December 1873, and his tombstone, ‘erected by his affectionate daughter Fanny Wright’, is now to be found at the Rookwood Cemetery. His Hebrew name was Michael ben Ya'akov. He was survived by three children, Frances Hannah Wright of Wright's Wharf, Sydney, Mrs Sophia Palmer of the Royal Standard Hotel, Grafton Wharf, Sydney, and George Davies of the Australian office, Windsor. Five of his children had predeceased him.
Florentia (2) Indent 4/4016, 30-2239; Prisoners to Port Macquarie 4/3897, p. 418; CP 45/372, in 2/7839; AOT 67/75, 68/95, 4/3897, p. 418; Commercial Journal, 31 October 1840; CSO 20/3/88, 27 October 1845; CS Out Letters 40/9662; CS In Letters 40/12928, 41/259; Sydney Morning Herald, 4 January 1859, 29 December 1873; Australasian Chronicle, 8 December 1840; Bell's Life in Sydney and Sporting Reviewer, 28 March 1856, 8 January 1859, 8 August 1859; Supreme Court of New South Wales, Probate Office Register, series 2, no. 1217; Sydney Gazette, 14 March 1839; Mercury, 6 January 1874; Sydney Morning Herald, 5 September 1843; Information on the early connections with the bushranger gang from research by Colin John Roope, Newcastle; AG, ch. 18, p. 242f.
DAVIS, Aaron
b. Wales, 1760–1814
Alexander; 1788; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Bristol, 1785.
Single; Height: 163 cm; 5 children.
Aaron Davis arrived on the First Fleet. He was transported for stealing watches and rings from James Cunning.
Mollie Gillen suggests that this may be the same Aaron Davis who was charged in London on 4 December 1802 for stealing a bundle from a cart. His plea to the court was: ‘I am a young lad and come out of Wales to buy beasts for my mother and father’. If this is the same person, Aaron Davis was certainly not Jewish.
On 4 March 1790 Davis was sent to Norfolk Island, where he cleared some land near Sydney Bay and was soon supporting three people. Mary Walker had three children by Davis. They were Rebecca (1791), Ann (1793), and Mary (c. 1796). Davis prospered on Norfolk Island. In 1794 he employed the Jewish convict Peter Opley (q.v.) as a labourer on his land. Davis became an importer and exporter and in 1805 was ‘victualled’ as a ‘collector of dutys’. He left Norfolk Island in 1805 and returned to England. He applied to return to New South Wales in 1813 where members of his family lived. He was now aged fifty and had ‘suffered severe losses’. He died before he could leave for Australia. There was a son, Francis, born to Davis by Elizabeth Hosier in 1804, and another son born to Mary Walker. Only his daughters Ann and Mary were mentioned in his will.
M. Gillen, The Founders of Australia, p. 96f.; J. Cobley, The Crimes of the First Fleet Convicts, p. 70; HO 10/6, 10/7; Norfolk Island Victualling List, A1958; Sydney Gazette, 9 September 1804, 27 March 1813.
DAVIS, Abraham (Henry WILLIAMS)
b. Commercial Road, London, 1801–1864
Coromandel, 1820; Convict; Sentenced to life, Middlesex, 1819.
Single; Butcher; Height: 165 cm.
Abraham Davis was transported twice. He was tried in London on 15 September 1819 and again at London on 12 February 1826. In 1819 he was arrested for being found with three stolen watches hidden in his clothes. Davis was part of a gang of pickpockets, who tried to rescue him when he was arrested, making the officer feel that his life was ‘in great danger’. Dark, pock-pitted complexion, dark brown hair, light blue eyes. He escaped by the Leviathan in 1822.
Abraham Davis arrived in New South Wales on 4 April 1820 and on 10 April was forwarded to Windsor. He appeared on the Colonial Secretary's records on 8 September 1821 as a labourer ‘victualled by Government’. On 6 March 1822 he was listed as a member of the clearing party on Mr Terry's estate. On 8 November 1823 he was discharged from Emu Plains and sent to Penrith, where he remained on the list of prisoners to be assigned to work for the government. In a petition to Governor Darling, Davis told the story of his deportation, escape and second deportation: ‘After a short stay [in New South Wales] returned again to Europe’. Davis was captured in London staying with his sisters in Spitalfields. He claimed to be a Henry Williams. He was tried a second time and sentenced to life imprisonment on Norfolk Island and was returned to Hobart Town on the Earl St Vincent (4). He was transhipped on the Portland for Sydney, put on board the hulk, and in August 1827 was sent to Norfolk Island, where for three years he served as convict overseer and constable. In 1831 he asked for a mitigation of sentence and was firmly refused.
The commandant at Norfolk Island wrote: ‘has acted as constable with tolerable skill’. The station at Norfolk Island was closed down and its convicts sent to the mainland where Davis received a ticket of leave. He was given permission to marry Catherine Elizabeth Solomon (q.v.) on 22 July 1835. It was Sydney's twelfth Jewish wedding. In Sydney he began a career as a dealer and as a professional pugilist and was known as ‘the Australian Belasco’. A long account of a famous barehanded boxing match with Jackson, a baker, on 3 September 1832, is to be found in Bell's Life in Australia:
The Israelite walked steadily into the ring, and although in his proportions as the man of dough, exhibited an iron bark trunk which seemed to put all the baker's elements at defiance. The match had been circulated as one of great interest, the tribe of Israel looking forward to their countryman, as the national prop. There were 25 rounds and at the 26th Davis ‘sent doughey to doss’ with as fine a beating as a man would wish to receive. The Jews hoisted their clansman on their shoulders and with clamorous hurras, bore him away from the ring.
The triumph was short-lived. On the way back to Sydney the victory went to the Jewish spectators' heads. As the newspaper report continued: ‘The more lucky Israelites challenged all whom they chanced to meet at the various public houses on the Parramatta Rd … Mr McC—placed a hundred in the Bank of N. S. W., the fruit of his industrious earnings on this occasion’.
On 21 March 1836 the Sydney Gazette reported that Abraham Davis, ‘checktaker of the theatre’, and his wife Catherine had accused innkeeper Abraham Myers (q.v.) of assault. The case was dismissed as it turned out that ‘Catherine had the best of it’.
Davis received a conditional pardon on 20 November 1837 although two offences were noted in his dossier. On 30 October 1837 he was admonished for having been found in a public house and in 1838 he was reprimanded for striking a woman in the street. Davis was granted an absolute pardon in 1843. He gave £14 to the synagogue in 1845. Davis appeared in the Registry of Flash Men, where it was alleged that he was part of an underworld gang, with Nathan Jacobs (q.v.), John Jacobs (q.v.), Sol Reubens (q.v. Solomon Reuben), Francis Cohen (q.v.), and Barnett Davis. Abraham Davis died in Sydney on 20 May 1864 and was buried in the Devonshire Street Cemetery. Catherine died on 27 August 1877 and was buried at Rookwood.
OBSP, 1819, case 1280, p. 452, 1825–26, case 212, p. 92; Petitions to Governor Darling, 29/8549, in 4/2051; CON 21/33, no. 302; TL no. 722, 4/4062; CP Register 6, 39/39; A1289 p. 169; Bell's Life in Australia and Weekly Retrospect of All Events of Importance, 7 September 1832; HO 10/53; W. A. Miles, Registry of Flash Men, p. 114; Sydney Gazette, 21 March 1836.
DAVIS, Charles
1849; Free.
Married; 2 children.
Charles and Julia Davis of Auckland had their first child registered in the Sydney Birth register in 1849. A second son, Adolphus, was born in Sydney in 1854.
DAVIS, Coleman
1822–1904
Free.
The son of Mordecai (Mark) and Hannah Davis of London, Coleman Davis was born on 23 January 1822. Coleman (Colonymous) Davis gave ten shillings and sixpence to the Sydney Synagogue building appeal in 1845. He was buried in the Jewish section of the Rookwood Cemetery on 30 October 1904, ‘beloved father of Fanny (Francesca), Phoebe, Maude and J. E. Davis’.
Sydney Morning Herald, 29 October 1904.
DAVIS, David
b. London, 1806
Agamemnon, 1819; Convict; Sentenced to life, Old Bailey, 1818.
Single; Shoemaker.
Fair pockmarked complexion, brown hair, hazel eyes. Jew. Davis was twelve years of age when he was sentenced on 17 June 1818 at the Old Bailey for a crime committed on 25 March 1817. The boy had jumped onto a moving open carriage and stolen a purse with notes to the value of £11. He had one previous conviction of eighteen months.
A conditional pardon was issued in 1848 (48/52).
DAVIS, David
b. London
Palambam, 1833; Free.
Single; Quill manufacturer.
Davis arrived in Sydney on 10 January 1833 as a free settler on the Palambam. He was listed as a ‘quill manufacturer’. Davis was mentioned in the Registry of Flash Men as the owner of a small jeweller's shop in King Street, with the claim that he would ‘buy anything with no troublesome questions’.
Palambam Indent 4/5204; Sydney Morning Herald, 28 June 1844, 19 December 1844; W. A. Miles, Registry of Flash Men, p. 69.
DAVIS, David
b. London, 1822–1901
1843; Free.
Single; Dealer; 13 children (6 in England).
David Davis was the first born son of Mark (Mordecai) Davis and Hannah (née Nathan) who migrated to England from Posen in 1815. Their seven children were born in Fishmonger Alley in Southwark, East London. David's brothers Coleman (q.v.) and Samuel (q.v.) also came to Australia.
David Davis was a jeweller and clockmaker (one of the first clockmakers in Australia). He married Eleanor Ellis (q.v.), the daughter of Elias and Rebecca Ellis (qq.v.), on 18 December 1844. It was Jewish marriage no. 67 in Sydney. He was a seat holder in the Sydney Synagogue from 1845 to 1848. Davis established a jewellery business at 103 King Street and then 475 King Street. On 10 March 1846 he announced in the Australian that he had commenced business as an ‘auctioneer, appraiser and furniture broker’, at the ‘Furniture Mart, 518 George St, Sydney’.
David and Eleanor had seven children in Australia. They were Fanny (1845), Morris (1847), Samuel (1849 in Queanbeyan), Mark (1851), Rebecca (1852), Elias (1854), and Hannah (1856). Having made a fortune, the family returned to England and settled at 59 Gordon Square—where another six children were born.
Sydney Morning Herald, 7 February 1845, 2 September 1845, 10 March 1846; AJHS Archives, Sydney.
DAVIS, Edward (George WILKINSON)
b. Gravesend, 1814–1843
Camden (2), 1833; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, London, 1832.
Single; Stable boy.
Dark, ruddy, much freckled complexion. Dark brown, nearly black hair. Hazel eyes. Large nose. Scar over left eyebrow. MJDBN tattooed inside lower left arm. EDHDM, ‘love’, and an anchor on left arm. Five blue dots between thumb and forefinger of left hand. Can read and write. A Jew. Edward Davis (or Davies) was tried for stealing, on 28 February 1832, one wooden till, valued at two shillings, and 5 shillings in copper money from a shop. He was described as ‘late of Ealing a labourer’ and was sentenced under the alias ‘George Wilkinson’. (In that dossier he said he had been born in Sheerness.) Davis had one previous conviction with a sentence of seven days. His father, Michael John Davies (q.v.), had arrived in the colony in 1830, and his mother, Hannah (q.v.), in 1832.
The convict transport ship Camden arrived in Sydney on 18 February 1833. On 23 December 1833 Davis escaped from the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney, was caught and sentenced to twelve months ‘deportation’. He was sent to the Phoenix hulk, described as a ‘shoemaker’ and dispatched to the Parramatta Iron Gang and then on to Penrith. On 1 December 1835 he absconded, was caught again and sentenced to a further twelve months in gaol. On 10 January 1837, Davis absconded again and two more years were added to his original sentence. On 21 July 1838 he was again ‘absent from the Gaol Gang’. Another two years were added to his sentence, but this time he remained at large.
Davis became head of a gang of bushrangers who had been operating in the region of the Lower Hunter River around the town of Maitland. The gang had been formed by five convicts who had escaped from the Hyde Park Barracks in August 1840. Edward Davis only became a member of the gang during its last desperate weeks of action. Amazement at this bizarre recruit caused the entire group to be dubbed ‘The Jewboy Gang’. The gang wore ‘broad rimmed Manilla hats, turned up at the front with an abundance of braid pink ribbons, satin neck cloth, splendid brooches all of them had rings and watches’. Davis wore no fewer than five rings.
Davis was reputed to have flogged a squatter at the public triangle at Wollombi and ‘rounded up’ the chief constable of the district and robbed him. On 1 December 1840 he entered and robbed the public house of Henry Joseph Cohen (q.v.) at Black Creek, Maitland, situated on ‘one of the most frequented roads of the colony’. At the end of December, Davis and his gang were captured at Scone, following an ambush and gunfight, and on 24 February 1841 the gang was committed for trial at the Supreme Court in Sydney. In the account of the trial in the Australasian Chronicle, on 25 February 1841, Edward's name is spelled ‘Davies’—which was his father's surname. On 16 March 1843, ‘Jewboy Davis’ was hanged, ‘attended by Mr [Jacob] Isaacs [q.v.], the Jewish Rabbi’. Davis set ‘a keen penetrating glance upon the crowd [and] with firm step, mounted the ladder’ and met his death. We now know that his father was standing in the crowd. Davis was buried in a corner of the Devonshire Street Jewish Cemetery later that same day.
Australasian Chronicle, 25 February 1841, 18 March 1841; Phoenix (hulk) Entrance Book, 1834, 4/6286, no. 1150; Parramatta Gaol Record Book, no. 1397, 4/6350; Mr Forde, ‘Old Sydney’, Truth, 20 September 1908; William Joy and Tom Prior, The Bushrangers, Shakespeare Head Press, Sydney, 1963, pp. 19–20; G. F. J. Bergman, ‘Edward Davis: Life and Death of an Australian Bushranger’, AJJHS, vol. 4, no. 5 (1956); Mercury, 25 May 1866; J. M. H. Abbott, Castle Vane: A Romance of Bushranging on the Upper Hunter in the Olden Days, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1920. C. Roope and P. Gregson, An Organised Banditti: The Story behind the ‘Jewboy’ Bushranger Gang; AG, pp. 67, 205, 242–55.
DAVIS, Elias
b. London, 1776–1806
Hillsborough, 1798; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1796.
Single.
Elias Davis was convicted of breaking and entering the house of a blacksmith in Whitechapel in the forenoon and stealing clothes. He was chased and caught trying to escape.
At the Criminal Court of New South Wales, the Court of Capital Jurisdiction, on 29 August 1806, Elias Davis was convicted and ‘put to the bar and indicted capitally’ for having stolen meat, wheat and sugar from the house of Robert Broughton, near Parramatta. He had been seen breaking the door lock and was arrested inside the house. On 31 August, it was reported that the Judge Advocate had asked him to recall ‘a very recent similar act of atrocious outrage from which he had been permitted to escape under a hope of his contrition and amendment. He was now upon the very brink of eternity and the work of his own salvation became his only duty’. The end came quickly. ‘On Thursday, Elias Davis was executed in pursuance of his sentence-at 8 in the morning he was taken to the place of atonement, and being of the Israelite profession was attended at his own request by a friend of the same Religion. Since the stern necessity of example required so awful an atonment from the unhappy sufferer it is much to be hoped that from his dreadful fate some may be disposed to forsake the paths which lead to ignomony and remorse of conscience in the hour of death.’
It is not known who accompanied Elias Davis to the gallows, but it was probably Joseph Marcus (q.v.), who, at that time, was employed as a constable.
OBSP, 1796–97, case 332, p. 318; Sydney Gazette, 31 August 1806, 7 September 1806; Criminal Court of New South Wales, 7/31, ML, 1149.
Elizabeth was the daughter of Philip and Catherine Russell and sister of Henry Davis (q.v.), Henry Russell (q.v.), and George Russell (q.v.). Her parents, whose surname had been Levy, evidently adopted Russell, the name of one of the principal streets in Sheerness, and made it their own. Some of their children followed their example while others chose the surname ‘Davis’.
Elizabeth may have come to Van Diemen's Land with Henry Davis in 1822. Henry had some highly unprofitable experiences in Launceston and Elizabeth's sister's former brother-in-law Joseph Solomon (q.v.) had built a substantial home in Evandale. On 12 February 1838 Elizabeth Russell married Thomas Fall of Evandale at the local Anglican Church. They would have lived at Tallentine, which was one of the homes of Thomas Fall, or at the Hollies, which is now known as Franklin House. By 1847 Thomas Fall had built the Clarendon Hotel, a large building in the centre of Evandale. He was granted a licence for the hotel in 1857 and in 1860 acquired the mansion called Prosperous House, which he renamed Fallgrove House.
The Falls had two daughters, Elizabeth (1839–1939) and Catherine (1842–1935). In 1888, Catherine married William Hartnoll, the member for South Launceston in the Tasmanian Parliament. When Elizabeth's brother, Henry Davis, and his wife died, Elizabeth took in their orphaned son, Philip Davis (1837–1893), who had been born in Launceston.
Elizabeth's daughters became the guardian angels of the Launceston Synagogue, preventing its sale in 1912, and leaving £500 to the Launceston and Hobart synagogues, the interest to be used for the services of a minister. Elizabeth Fall died in October 1875 and Thomas Fall in September 1888. The disposition of their estates shows that Elizabeth and her two daughters had maintained close ties with their Jewish heritage and their Jewish relatives in England. There is mention of an uncle, Michael John Russell of Woollahra, and a bequest to Sara Louisa, Lady Samuels, of London.
Research by Joanne Acton and Peter Elias, Hobart.
DAVIS, Elizabeth
b. Hobart Town, 1827–1891
Free.
Elizabeth Davis was the daughter of Henry Davis (q.v.) and Hannah Howell. Hannah was the sister of Judah Solomon's (q.v.) common-law wife Elizabeth.
On 10 February 1848 Judah Solomon applied to the Committee of the Hobart Synagogue for permission to allow the marriage of his illegitimate son Joseph Solomon (q.v.) to Joseph's first cousin Elizabeth Davis, ‘having consideration that the fathers of each were Jews and that the parties had also been brought up as Jews’. Neither Joseph Solomon nor Elizabeth Davis had Jewish mothers, and both were converted. At that time Elizabeth's sister Catherine was also converted to Judaism.
Elizabeth Davis and Joseph Solomon (the son of Judah Solomon and Elizabeth Howell) were married on 14 November 1849 at Temple House in Hobart. They were twenty-two and twenty-seven years of age respectively.
DAVIS, Elizabeth
1835–1901
1839; Free.
Single.
Elizabeth Davis came to Australia with her parents, John and Louisa (qq.v.), when she was three years of age. She was a grandchild of Judah Solomon (q.v.) of Hobart Town. On 14 February 1855 she married Louis Abrahams, a draper, aged twenty-four, in Hobart Town. He had arrived as a free settler in Van Diemen's Land in 1853. His shop was at the corner of Liverpool and Murray streets. At the time of her marriage, Elizabeth lived with her parents at Brighton.
DAVIS, Folk
Folk Davis was a seat holder in the Sydney Synagogue in 1845.
DAVIS, George
b. London, 1810
John, 1832; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1831.
Married; Dealer; Height: 161 cm.
Very dark sallow complexion, black hair, chestnut coloured eyes, large nose. Thick set, in appearance, a Jew. No education. No children. George Davis was convicted at London on 1 December 1831 for dealing in stolen goods.
The John arrived in Sydney on 8 June 1832. On 2 October 1836 the Hobart Town Courier carried a notice warning the public about George Davis and offering a £10 reward for his capture. Davis had been an agent at the Parramatta store that belonged to Lawrence and Stephen Spyer (qq.v.). He had absconded with ‘various sums of money and other effects’.
John Printed Indent, 1832, no. 32, 1236, p. 67.
Dark sallow complexion, brown hair, hazel eyes. George Davis was sentenced on 19 February 1823.
George Davis arrived in New South Wales on 5 March 1824. A police note reads ‘Ran’ from the colony in June 1825—he was then transported again as ‘George Burnett’ by the Waterloo in August 1833, with a seven-year sentence. He received a ticket of leave in 1844. On 5 August 1844 he was sent to Cockatoo Island for two years. Davis was punished for trying to obtain a certificate of freedom by using the date of his first conviction to show that his time had expired. He was discharged from the Maitland Stockade on 12 May 1845 and three years later was given a second ticket of leave. Davis received a conditional pardon in 1852.
Records at Hyde Park Barracks and written into Guildford (6) Indent, 1824, 4/5721; TL 44/8305, 48/286; CP 52/104.
DAVIS, Henry (né LEVY)
b. 1797 at Sheerness, d. 1843
1822; Free.
Single; Dealer; 7 children.
Brother of John Davis (q.v.), Henry Davis was the first free male Jewish settler to Van Diemen's Land. He was born in Sheerness. His father, whose surname was Levy, had been a shopkeeper in Sheerness but had moved to London and worked as a baker in Drury Lane. Henry Davis was said to be a relative of John Davies (q.v.), son of Michael John Davies (q.v.), who certainly had spent some time in Sheerness during his English career.
Davis wrote to Lord Bathurst before leaving England stating that he had £500 and asked for ‘the usual grant allowed by the government’. The petition was signed by his brother, Phillip Russell (né Levy). By the middle of June 1822, Davis was working as an auctioneer and dealer in Liverpool Street in Hobart Town. He had imported drapery, jewellery, cash and china worth £2882 on the Tiger and Denmark Hill. He also brought out money collected by the Jews of Sheerness for Judah Solomon and his brother Joseph Solomon (qq.v.).
Henry Davis married the 20-year-old Hannah Howell at St John's Church, Launceston, on 19 August 1823. Hannah was the sister of Judah Solomon's de facto wife Elizabeth. In October 1824 Henry Davis became a licensed publican at the Commercial Tavern in Launceston and received valuable rural and urban land grants. In 1828 he fled to Sydney in order to escape his creditors, leaving his property in the possession of George Russell and Abraham Aaron (q.v.). The police intervened and Davis was put in prison in Sydney. In Ocober 1827 the Commercial Tavern burned down and Aaron suspected that John Fawkner, an associate of Judah Solomon, of arson. Aaron challenged Fawkner to a duel which does not seem to have been fought. Aaron was able to return to England in 1829.
By 1831 Davis was back in Launceston, where he claimed to have spent more than £1200 on a two-storey brick house known as the British Hotel. He applied for a grant of land to establish a ‘bark bruisery’. In September 1832, following the death of an infant child, he asked for a grant of land for a Jewish cemetery. Lieutenant Governor Arthur refused the request, and the baby was buried in ‘private ground’ rather than in a Christian cemetery. Davis was listed as insolvent in Launceston in 1836. On 24 October 1836, ‘Henry Davis and Hannah his wife’ organised the gift of a plot of land at Cataract Hill, Launceston, for a Jewish cemetery. The land measured 49 feet by 10 feet and adjoined a block already owned by Davis. According to the text of the memorial addressed to the government, Davis made the gift ‘In consideration of the Love and Affection which the said Henry Davis hath and beareth towards the People called Jews and of the sum of Ten shillings to the said Henry Davis in hand paid by them the said Moses Phillips [q.v.], Moses Josephs [q.v.], Samuel Hyams [q.v.], John Jacobs [q.v.], Samuel Levy [q.v.], David Solomon [q.v.], John Lyons and Isaac Abrahams [q.v.]’.
Following his discharge from insolvency, Davis moved to Oatlands, where he gained a licence to work as an auctioneer. Business was slow and Davis travelled across Bass Strait to join the new colony at Port Phillip.
In the four-year-old ramshackle village of Melbourne, in November 1839, Henry Davis opened a ‘new’ sales and storeroom in Collins Street and began to advertise extensively. His stock consisted of ale, port, wine, tea, coffee, cider and slop clothing, at ‘very low prices’. He then imported forty-nine ‘Timor Ponies’. John Pascoe Fawkner fumed at such ‘folly’, and wrote in his Port Phillip Patriot: ‘We find by a notice from the importer of these RATS, half starved and useless as they are that we have incurred the high displeasure of the mighty Solomon. Can this be Solomon the wise man—oh, no no—it is only Solomon the speculator’. Davis had auction rooms in Collins Street in 1840. Always optimistic, the Port Phillip Herald of 29 May 1840 reported: ‘Mr Davis, the auctioneer, has taken the “Victoria Tavern” in Collins St and intends building in front of it a commodious hotel and Masonic lodge’.
Davis, the auctioneer, failed and he became the hotel keeper of the Royal Exchange Hotel in Collins Street in September 1841, only to face bankruptcy proceedings again on 31 March 1842. His remaining Victorian property was compulsorily sequestered on 13 June of that year.
A daughter of Henry Davis died in 1840. Her funeral was the first Jewish burial in the new colony and created great technical difficulties. In the first place, the building in which her body lay prior to burial caught fire and the ‘watchers’ were forced to carry the body across the road. Second, the ground near Merri Creek in Northcote, chosen for the Jews' burial place, consisted almost entirely of solid rock. Her body was later exhumed and shipped to Hobart Town.
The children of Henry Davis and Hannah were Henry Davis jnr (1823–1899); the daughter who died in Melbourne and was born in Hobart Town (1824–1840) Philip (1834–1893); and three daughters, Elizabeth (1827) (q.v), Catherine (1833–1856), and Sarah, (1825). Catherine and Sarah were officially converted to Judaism in Hobart Town in February 1848, at the request of their uncle, Judah Solomon. Elizabeth married Joseph Solomon (q.v.), the illegitimate son of Judah Solomon, and, confusingly, Sarah married another Joseph Solomon, the son of Samuel Solomon (q.v.). Catherine died aged twenty-three, and was buried at the Hobart Jewish Cemetery on 1 October 1856.
When Henry Davis snr died in Van Diemen's Land, ‘penniless and broken’, in 1847, Elizabeth (now Fall), his sister, was asked to care for his two sons, Philip and Henry jnr. There is an official reference to a ‘Henry Davis of Launceston’, who was the designated administrator of the estate of his father, who died in 1847. On 12 May 1852 the legal representatives of Mr Joseph Solomon of Macquarie Street in Hobart Town wrote to the authorities regarding his brother-in-law, Mr Henry Davis of Launceston, who was ‘labouring under severe mental derangement’. Mr Solomon, they wrote, would pay any costs required for his upkeep.
Henry Davis (jnr) (Zvi ben Shmuel) died on 9 December 1899, aged seventy-eight. He was described as a solicitor of Evandale. Philip Davis died on 24 February 1893, aged fifty-seven. Both men were buried beside their aunt, Elizabeth, in Hobart's Jewish Cemetery in Cornelian Bay.
CO 201/106, 6 November 1821; CSO 1/224/5447, 11 February 1828; CSO 1/153/3700; CSO 24/156/5434; CSO 1/6, pp. 8–9; CSO 24/156/5434, 12 May 1852; Application for Land, LSD, 1/73/74 (April 1823); LSD 1/82/252; Port Phillip Patriot, 2, 4, 18 November 1839; Port Phillip Gazette, 8 May 1841, 11 September 1841, 15 December 1841; Port Phillip Herald, 29 May 1840.
DAVIS, Isaac
b. London, 1796–1856
Sir William Bensley, 1817; Convict; Sentenced to life, London, 1815.
Single; Labourer; Height: 161 cm.
Longish nose, ring in his left ear, black hair, dark complexion, hazel eyes. He lived with his father in Whitechapel. Isaac Davis (aged twenty) and Moss Jacobs (q.v.) (aged eighteen) were both sentenced to death. Davis picked up a woman and was taking her to a wine vault near Duke's Place. As they walked towards Petticoat Lane, they were joined by Moss Jacobs, and the two men tried to rob the woman of her shawl and her money. At the time of the offence, Davis was described as wearing a dark coat, a light waistcoat, and bright pantaloons. Both Davis and Jacobs were sent out to Australia on the same transport.
Isaac Davis appeared before the Sydney Court of Quarter Sessions on 23 April 1827 accused of receiving stolen property (clothes), together with Samuel Levy (q.v.). They were found not guilty. On 15 March 1834 he was described as having no trade or calling and was placed by the Parramatta Bench in the iron gang for twelve months. In the General Return of Convicts in New South Wales of 1830 he was listed as thirty-five years of age and working as an assigned convict servant for Thomas Hall of Windsor. Davis received a ticket of leave on 11 September 1838. Two weeks before the confirmation of his new status, Davis wrote from the District of Windsor asking to be allowed to go to Sydney for ‘the purpose of being supported by the Jews' Philanthropic Institution’. A conditional pardon was granted to Davis on 1 June 1848. He was buried by the Sydney Synagogue in 1856.
OBSP, 1815–16, case 3, p. 5; Ship Indent 4/4005, p. 294; CS 4/4122, 28 August 1838, recording TL 38/1472, and CP 48/970; Parramatta Gaol Record Book, 1834, 4/6530; Governors' Despatches, 1827, A1200, 23 April 1827.
DAVIS, Isaac
1812–1845
Free.
Single; Dealer; 2 children.
Isaac Davis married the 18-year-old Esther Hart on 8 September 1841 at the Bridge Street Sydney Synagogue. Their child, Elizabeth, was born in Sydney on 5 September 1842 and her birth was registered at the synagogue. In 1845, Isaac Davis gave £10 to the Sydney Synagogue's building appeal.
On Friday night, 7 February 1845, the home and store of Isaac Davis at Boorowa, some 25 miles north of Yass, was attacked by a group of eight armed and mounted bushrangers. The family was ‘bailed up’ and the store plundered. Isaac Davis fought back, was shot and wounded; he died from the effect of his wounds on 9 February 1845. Davis was working as the agent of Isaac Levey (q.v.) of Berrima, and Levey offered a reward of £20 for the recovery of his stolen property. Friends of the deceased collected together £10 as a reward for information on the bush-rangers. The government offered £80 reward or a conditional pardon for information received. The funeral of Isaac Davis ‘of Boorowa’ was the first Jewish funeral in the Jewish cemetery at Goulburn. He left two children, Elizabeth (1842) and Amelia (1844). His widow Esther married Moss Marks (q.v.) in 1854. She died in Sydney in 1914.
Sentinel, 19 February 1845.
DAVIS, Isaac (Hyam)
b. London, 1813–1876
Lady Feversham, 1830; Convict; Sentenced to 14 years, Old Bailey, 1829.
Single; Errand boy; Height: 148 cm; 8 children.
Ruddy fair freckled complexion. Light brown hair, hazel eyes. ‘I. D.’ tattooed on left arm. Isaac Davis was a pickpocket, aged sixteen, who stole a handkerchief and veils at St Paul's Churchyard. No previous conviction. Could not read or write. He was sentenced on 29 October 1829.
Isaac Davis arrived at Port Jackson on 29 July 1830 and was sent to the Carter's Barracks for Boys. On 24 September 1833 he was sentenced for disobedience and neglect of duty for fighting with the housekeeper. Isaac was placed in the cells on bread and water and then returned to assigned service. He was in the district of Cassilis in 1839, and received a ticket of leave in 1840 for the Liverpool Plains District. On 6 July 1840 he was absent from the muster, his ticket of leave was cancelled, and he was to be placed in a probationary work gang. On 22 November 1842, Isaac Davis was permitted to proceed to the Liverpool Plains as an assigned servant to Edward Hamilton for the following twelve months. A certificate of freedom was granted on 8 January 1844. (His physical description at that time shows that his mature height was 158.5 cm.)
Davis married Rachel Morrow at Scots Church, Sydney, on 18 January 1847. He lived at 394 Kent Street, near Liverpool Street, and became a dealer and fruiterer at the George Street Market. He died on 28 July 1876, aged ‘sixty-six’, and was buried at Rookwood Cemetery's Old Jewish Section, in grave no. 276.
Isaac's children were Abraham (1847–1904), James Benjamin (1849–1904), Elizabeth (1852–1928), Isaac (1855–1878), Solomon (1857–1890), Rachel (1859), Mary (1862–1918), and John (1865–1950). All were brought up as Christians.
OBSP, 1829–30, case 69, p. 30; Printed Indent, 1830, p. 63, also 4/4144; TL 39/1558; TL 40/2276; CF 44/0025; CP 44/25, issued 8 January 1844, 4/4247; 22 November 1842, 42/1034; Sydney Morning Herald, 29 July 1876.
DAVIS, Isaac
b. London
1848; Free.
Watchmaker and jeweller.
Isaac Davis and Samuel Alexander (q.v.) commenced business opposite Mr Dinwoodie's Saddlery, at 1 Collins Street, Melbourne, on 27 April 1848. They were watchmakers and jewellers and their stock included watches, silver, and musical boxes. They also bought old gold. Davis moved to Ballarat at the time of the gold rush, was active in the Jewish community and remained there for thirty years before moving back to Melbourne in his old age.
Port Phillip Herald, 27 April 1848.
DAVIS, John
b. Bishopsgate Street, London, 1785–1867
Elizabeth, 1816; Convict; Sentenced to life, Middlesex, 1815.
Single; Dealer; Height: 163 cm.
Ruddy complexion, black to grey hair, dark brown eyes, long nose. Slightly pock-pitted. A Jew. Can neither read nor write. John Davis was sentenced for receiving a pocket book with £75 in it.
John Davis had a long and grim career as a convict. After his arrival in Sydney, Davis was sent to Windsor. On 25 February 1822 he was sentenced to be transported for life for attempting to escape from the prison settlement. On 25 March he was transported to Port Macquarie and, on 28 November, was sent on to Hobart Town on the Elizabeth Hewitt. Davis absconded from the notorious prison at Macquarie Harbour on the island's west coast in January 1823, only twenty-four days after arriving there, and was listed in the official return of runaways as ‘having perished in the woods’.
Davis, however, survived and, five years later, on 19 April 1828, was sent to Moreton Bay Penal Colony for repeatedly absconding and for being ‘otherwise incorrigible’. On 1 December 1829, he was sentenced to fifty lashes for indolence and for being mutinous. On 13 October 1830 he received seven days on the treadmill for having been absent for seven days. On 30 October he was sentenced to a further seven days on bread and water for being absent from his work detail. On 24 May 1834 he received a sentence of twelve months in the iron gang for absconding and having robbed a fellow prisoner. On 17 December 1835 he was sentenced to twenty-five lashes for insolence. On 4 September 1837, he received a further fifty lashes for ‘striking a light after curfew’.
In the Parramatta Gaol Record Book for 1839 Davis was recorded as having been committed at the Liverpool Supreme Court and sent to the Sydney Gaol. He had been a ‘house keeper’ for Mr G. Stuart at Goulburn. Davis was arraigned before the Campbelltown Quarter Sessions on 18 February 1840 ‘for being at large with firearms’. He stated: ‘I was sentenced for bush ranging. I had no arms’. He had been absent from the road gang for two months. Davis received his third life sentence, and was sent to Norfolk Island, arriving there on 1 March 1840. During the next two years he received three severe punishments for gambling and for absence from his work gang. His name appears on the list of nine Norfolk Island Jewish convicts who wrote to the Sydney Synagogue for prayer books so that they might observe the Sabbath.
Davis was sent back to Van Diemen's Land on the Lady Franklin, arriving in Hobart Town on 26 November 1845, and was sent to the Cascades Prison Factory. On 1 December he was given fourteen days in solitary confinement for giving a pair of new government-issue boots from the stores directly to a fellow prisoner. November 1846 saw him at New Norfolk in the road gang. Despite minor breaches of discipline, he was issued with a ticket of leave on 1 August 1848. This came to an end in Hobart Town on 14 November 1848, when he was convicted of burglary and stealing an item valued at less than £5. He was sent to Port Arthur for eighteen months imprisonment and hard labour. A ticket of leave was reissued on 20 January 1852. On 19 April he was in trouble again for gambling and falsely pretending that he had a certificate of freedom. On 22 September 1853 he was sentenced in Hobart Town to eighteen months hard labour for theft and larceny. The ticket of leave was reissued on 19 June 1855. It was revoked again on 29 May 1857 as he had been found gambling. A conditional pardon was granted on 30 June 1857. It was revoked when Davis stole again, was issued once more in October, revoked in 1858 and again in February 1859 for being absent from the Muster. In 1860 he was admitted to the Prisoners' Barracks in Hobart Town as an invalid, and in 1863 he was moved to Port Arthur. He died there on 25 November 1867.
In Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives, the distinct possibility that Davis wrote an imaginative autobiography while at Norfolk Island is explored.
CON 33/71 no 17045; Parramatta Gaol Book 4/6533 no. 2142 for 1839; Norfolk Island Papers 4/2698.1. prisoner no. 181; Davis Narrative, in Evans Norfolk Island Convict Papers, ms. Q168, c. 1842, ML; Lucy Frost and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart (eds), Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives, MUP, Carlton, 2001, p. 49f.
DAVIS, John
b. 1803
Guildford (5), 1822; Convict; Sentenced to life, Kent Assizes, 1821.
Pedlar.
John Davis was sentenced at the Kent Assizes on 13 June 1821.
John Davis received a colonial conviction in Sydney on 3 February 1827 for sheep stealing, and was sentenced to fourteen years with hard labour in chains. He arrived at Moreton Bay on 30 April 1827 on the Alligator, and returned to Sydney on 5 August 1836. While described as a ‘Jew’ in the Chronological Register of Convicts at Moreton Bay (no. 510), Davis was listed in the 1828 Census with no religion noted.
DAVIS, John
b. London, 1804–1860
Juliet, 1839; Free.
Married; Hotel keeper; 12 children.
The son of Benjamin Davis and brother of Henry Davis (q.v.), John Davis was married on 26 March 1826, at London's Great Synagogue, to the 14-year-old Louisa (née Solomon) (q.v). When John and Louisa arrived in Van Diemen's Land, Louisa's father, Judah Solomon (q.v.), gave John Davis the lease of the Castle Inn in Brighton, twenty miles from Hobart Town and the main military post in Van Diemen's Land. Judah Solomon had financed the hotel when it was established in 1830 and when Louisa and John arrived he called in the debt. The name was changed to the Castle Inn and Brighton Hotel. Davis also became the proprietor of the Regulator Coach Service in Brighton in 1841. Within a few years Davis had acquired a number of properties in the district. When Judah Solomon died in 1856 the inn was left to his illegitimate son Joseph, though Davis retained the licence until he died.
John and Louisa Davis had twelve children. They were Benjamin (born in England), Hannah (1829), Esther (1831–1905), who married Lewis Solomon (q.v.) in Brighton in 1847, Judah (1833), Cecilia (1834), who married Godfrey Jacobs of Dunedin, Elizabeth (q.v.) (1835–1901), who married Lewis (later, Louis) Abrahams, Sarah (1839), who married Joseph Benjamin, Mary Louise (1841–1894), who married Montagu M. Lee, Rebecca (1843), who married Moss Rosenfield, Samuel (1844), Isaac Archibald (1846–1911), who married Mary Sheenan, and Joseph (1848), who married Sarah Benjamin in Victoria.
John Davis died on 26 November 1860 and was buried in the old Hobart Jewish Cemetery, at Harrington Street. Louisa died on 8 December 1885 and was buried at the Melbourne General Cemetery.
Curly dark brown hair, black eyes. Heavily tattooed. WHRHEH, anchor, Mermaid, John Davis, on right arm. JTH on left arm with five dots between finger and thumb on the left hand.
John Davis arrived in Van Diemen's Land on 18 August 1830. He absconded from government service while assigned to Jocelyn Thomas Esq., on 22 October 1831. A reward of £2 was offered for his recapture.
Hobart Town Courier, 29 October 1831.
DAVIS, Joseph
1848; Free.
Single; 2 children.
Joseph Davis married Harriet Jacobs (q.v.) in a Jewish ceremony in Sydney on 21 November 1849. They had twins Max and John, in 1850, who were registered as ‘Hebrew’. David was born 1852 and Samuel was born in 1854 in Sydney.
York St Synagogue Birth Register
DAVIS, Judah
Free.
4 children
On 31 December 1848 Lewis Solomon (q.v.) put ‘a young man’, Judah Davis, in charge of his shop. Davis discovered that the ‘shopman’, E. A. Watts, was stealing articles from the shop and notified the police.
Launceston Examiner, 7 February 1849.
DAVIS, Judah Phillip
Free.
Married; Dealer.
Judah Phillip Davis was married to Maria Harris in a Jewish ceremony on 8 March 1843. Their child Joshua, born in Sydney in 1846, was registered as a ‘Hebrew’. Judah Phillip Davis was listed as a commission agent in Kent Street in Low's Directory of City and District of Sydney of 1847.
Lewis Davis married Rosa Lazarus, the sister of Henry Lewis, Moses, and Cashmore Lazarus (qq.v.). Davis was a founding member of the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation. He had been a widower when he married Rosa Lazarus in Melbourne on 12 November 1845 and the ceremony was Melbourne's second Jewish wedding. In a letter to the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation (letter 9), dated 9 April 1844, Lewis explained that he had ‘fallen behind’ in his membership payments. He wondered whether ‘in these bad times’ he could join the congregation anew. He also enrolled Alfred Harris (q.v.), his nephew, as a member. His financial plight continued in the next year. His name, however, appeared on the list of ‘British Jews’ at Port Phillip who signed an address congratulating Chief Rabbi Nathan Adler on his election as Chief Rabbi of the United Congregations of Jews in the British Empire. Lewis and Rosa had a son, Moses, born on 29 October 1846, and a daughter, Phoebe, in 1852 (by which time his first name was spelt ‘Louis’—an indication of his rise in social status).
Melbourne Hebrew Congregation, Birth Book.
DAVIS, Louisa (née SOLOMON)
b. Sheerness, 1812–1885
Juliet, 1839; Free.
Married; 12 children.
Louisa Davis was the daughter of Judah and Esther Solomon (qq.v.). Louisa married John Davis (q.v.), her maternal uncle, at the Great Synagogue in Duke's Place, London, on 26 March 1826. John Davis was named in Judah Solomon's will as living in Pontville, Brighton, Tasmania. John and Louisa Davis had twelve children. Louisa Davis died in Fitzroy, a suburb of Melbourne, on 8 December 1885, and was buried at the Melbourne General Cemetery.
DAVIS, Maria
1775–1848
Hercules, 1835; Free.
Married.
Maria Davis arrived in New South Wales with her son-in-law Isaac Levey (q.v.) and daughter Dinah. She died in Sydney at the age of seventy-three on 9 May 1848 and was buried in the Jewish section of the Devonshire Street Cemetery. Her grave was later relocated to the Botany Pioneer Memorial Park.
Michael Davis was a clothier of Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, in 1841. He was a founding member of the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation in 1843.
DAVIS, Moses (John)
b. Whitechapel, 1786–1816
Guildford, 1812; Convict; Sentenced to life, Surrey Quarter Sessions, 1811.
Height: 165 cm.
Curly dark brown hair, black eyes. Moses Davis was convicted in Surrey on 27 March 1811.
Moses Davis arrived in New South Wales on 18 January 1812 and was sent on to Van Diemen's Land. John Davis, or Moses Davis, was listed in a proclamation in the Sydney Gazette among the ‘list of profligate and disorderly persons who have fled into the woods to lead a life of idleness and profligacy’. The notice first appeared on 14 May 1814. Moses Davis was still absent in December, described as an ‘outlaw’, and was offered an amnesty providing that he surrendered. In 1816 it was officially noted in his dossier that he had ‘absconded’. His death and burial were recorded in the Parish Book of St Matthews, Windsor. He was said to have ‘Drowned on Sunday’ 22 December 1816, and to have been thirty years of age.
CON 13/1, p. 19; HRA, series 1, vol. 8, p. 264; Van Diemen's Land Gazette, 4 June 1814; Sydney Gazette, 14 May 1814, 16 July 1814, 8 July 1815, 15 June 1816.
DAVIS, Moses
Perseus and Coromandel, 1802
Convict, 7 years
Moses and Milly Davis (née Jacobs) were married at the Great Synagogue, London, on 23 September 1795. On 3 December 1800 Moses Davis appeared at the Old Bailey as a witness for the presecution of two men suspected of theft. He told the Court, ‘I keep a clothes shop in Grey's Inn Lane … I keep an open shop’. Davis, together with John Moore, was found guilty of theft at the Surrey Quarter Sessions of 1799/1800. They were accused of stealing two silver table spoons valued at fifteen shillings and one silver pepper box valued at fifteen shillings, the property of Abel Clifton. Davis was sentenced to seven years transportation.
Moses Davis arrived in Sydney in June or August 1802. There is a reference to an unclaimed letter waiting for him in Sydney on 12 April 1807, however on 19 March 1807 in London the same Moses Davis appeared before the London Rabbinical Court to formally divorce his wife. The Court recorded ‘during the time he was away from here, his wife had fornicated with others and had given birth to two mamzerot (illegitimate girls). The first was named Miriam (Maria in English) and the second Hendel (Hannah). At the time Milly was again pregnant and the Rabbinical Court agreed to issue a religious divorce. The matter of the girls’ status was still being sorted out in 1839.
Jeremy I. Pfeffer, From One End of the Earth to the Other, Sussex Academic Press (2008), p. 205f.
Davis was aged fifty-two when he was sentenced at Westminster on 27 November 1828 for obtaining goods by false pretences. He had been born in Poland and had served in the British Army. He was a ‘Cook and Mess-man’. He claimed to be married to Mary Ann Davis and had two children. The Manlius (2) arrived in Hobart Town on 12 August 1830. He was described as 171 cm, dark hair to grey, high receding forehead, dark eyes, medium long nose, wide thick under-lip.
The record of his convict service in Van Diemen's Land is brief. He was assigned to the service of Mr Farrell. On 30 December 1830 he was accused of ‘neglect of duty’ and was reprimanded. On 5 August 1831 he was again reprimanded for ‘laziness’. Davis arrived in New South Wales in 1838. He was aged sixty-two and a widower when, at St Andrew's Church in Sydney, he married a 16-year-old Scot named Henrietta Greenlaw. They had five children: William (1839), Esther (1840), Janet H. (1841), Amelia (1844) and Elizabeth (1856). The family lived in and around the area of Orange, Sofala and Bathurst.
Noson Davis suffered a series of insolvencies. In the Sydney Morning Herald, 18 December 1848, he is described as a cook living in Bourke Street, Sydney with bad debts of £54/9/- and personal property of 30 shillings. The Maitland Mercury, 23 February 1860 described Davis as a labourer and innkeeper of Sofala who had been declared insolvent.
Davis's death certificate states that he died at the Club House Hotel in Bathurst at the age of eighty-nine. He was buried in the Jewish section of Orange Cemetery on 14 July 1865. The funeral was conducted by Hyam Phillips (q.v.) and the witnesses were Henry Cohen and Simeon Moses.
CON 31-1-10, CON 23-1-1 CON 18-1-15. Family information supplied by Mary Caine and Karen Dixon.
DAVIS, Oscar (Anszel DAVIDOWICZ)
b. Prussia, 1777–1835
Fanny, 1816; Convict; Sentenced to 14 years, Chester, 1815.
Single; Pedlar; Height: 163 cm; 9 children.
Dark sallow complexion, black hair, black eyes. The prison keeper at Chester Castle recorded that he ‘behaves well in gaol’. He was transported for having forged currency in his possession. He was arrested in Macclesfield. He sold buttons at the fairs in Manchester, Macclesfield and Chester and used the mould for making buttons to forge florins. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced on 30 March 1815 to transportation for fourteen years. His Hebrew (first) name was Asher.
Davis was transported to New South Wales, arriving on 18 January 1816, and was then sent on to Hobart Town on the brig Emu. On 11 March 1817 Davis married Jane Elizabeth Forbes in Hobart Town. He was thirty-five years old and Jane was twenty-one. According to Government Orders of 20 September 1817, Davis was appointed a constable for the District of Hobart Town. He was listed in the Hobart Town Gazette (9 January 1819) as a ‘dealer’ who supplied £13 13s worth of candles to the district watch house. He travelled to Sydney as part of a police escort on the Prince Leopold, arriving on 30 August 1819 at the trial of a convict called Henry Morgan. Upon his return to Van Diemen's Land he was granted a conditional pardon on 31 January 1820.
Davis was listed in February 1820 on government rations with a wife and one child. On 9 May 1821 he was paid £16 8s for candles that he supplied to the Hobart Town Gaol before he commenced work as a constable. On 10 August 1820, as a constable, he was fined forty shillings for ‘neglect of duty’. Perhaps his second job as a dealer occupied his energies. On 31 August 1825 Davis petitioned the government for land. The Hobart Town police recommended a grant of 200 acres, stating that Davis was ‘active, intelligent, useful’. On 20 January 1827 he was reported for having accepted a bribe and on 19 October he was suspended from the police force. Davis prepared to open an inn in New Norfolk. The inn still stands, opposite the township of New Norfolk.
Davis's name appeared on a petition, dated 6 February 1829, ‘on behalf of the Jewish residents of Van Diemen's Land’, asking for recognition. He was fined for retailing rum without a licence on 3 August 1829 and during the next two years he was convicted of several counts of harbouring convicts and allowing them to drink in his house. There were complaints to the Colonial Secretary about Oscar Davis in his double capacity of pound keeper and Messenger of the Court of Requests. One job ‘requires his constant attendance at home and the other his almost constant absence from it’. Davis was dismissed from the job of pound keeper in favour of ‘some more respectable character’. He was landlord of the King's Arms (1821–28), the King of Prussia (1829–34) and the Belmont Inn (1835).
Oscar and Jane had nine children, all of whom were born and baptised in New Norfolk. They were Sarah (6 December 1817 to 19 August 1839), William (28 February 1820 to 9 August 1885), Deborah (6 February 1823 to 27 March 1903), Ann (4 September 1825 to 10 October 1830), Phoebe (11 December 1827 to 26 May 1864), Mary Ann (16 November 1830 to 16 May 1838), Elizabeth (31 January 1833 to 5 August 1888), and twins, Ossa (11 March 1835 to 23 May 1916) and Jane (11 March 1835 to 30 March 1915). Oscar Davis was listed as having subscribed five guineas to the New Town Church (Colonial Times, 24 September 1830). After Oscar died, on 1 November 1835, Deborah, Phoebe, Elizabeth and their mother settled in New Zealand. Jane Elizabeth Davis died on 8 August 1858.
In 1846 Governor Sir Charles A. Fitzroy consulted Phineas Moss (q.v.) about the death of a Polish Jew named Anszel Davidowicz, who was said to have had the name of ‘Dewis’ and had been ‘possessed of some property in one of the Australian Colonies’. Moss correctly identified Oscar Davis and wrote the ‘name Anzell Davidocz [sic] appears to be Polish and may probably be in English, Ansell Davis. About twelve or fourteen years earlier, a Polish Jew had died at New Norfolk and the European Jewish name may have been changed from Ansell, or as it is often pronounced in Hebrew, Anshell to Oscar’. Upon investigation, the widow of Oscar Davis denied that her husband was the object of the search: ‘he had no trade and died in indigent circumstances leaving a wife and many children who maintain themselves by labour’. Jane Davis most likely was protecting herself against a claim upon the estate from a member of her husband's family.
Macclesfield Courier, 14 January 1815, 8 April 1815; Hobart Town Gazette, 10 April 1819, 10 September 1819, 18 September 1819, 9 May 1821; Colonial Times, 24 September 1830; CO 201/118, A 1352; HO 10/1; CP 1331; CSO 1/269/649; CSO 1/334/7622, 31 August 1825; CSO 1/496/10864, April 1834; HRA, series 3, vol. 3, p. 597; J. Richard Davis, Oscar Davis and his Direct Descendants (privately printed, 1991).
DAVIS, Philip
d. 1893
Clyde, 1833; Free.
Single; Stable keeper; 3 children.
Philip Davis was a cousin of Joseph Solomon (q.v.), the illegitimate son of Judah Solomon (q.v.). Philip arrived in the colony on the Clyde on 18 January 1833. Philip Davis married Rebecca Hyams, aged 17, on 13 July 1859 at the Hobart Hebrew Congregation. They had three children, Louisa Anna (7 September 1860) at Spring Bay, Tasmania, Esther (8 August 1862) at Deloraine, and Kate (18 December 1868) in Longford.
On 24 February 1893 a Philip Davis, a stable keeper of Launceston, died and left property, valued at £1500, to Joseph Solomon. When Joseph Solomon jnr died, he left his property to Samuel Benjamin (son of Judah Benjamin) of Cincinnati, and to Kate Davis, a daughter of Philip Davis of Invermay near Launceston.
CUS 30, p. 188, AOT.
DAVIS, Phillip Joseph
Ann; Free.
Single; 2 children.
Phillip Davis (who had arrived on the Ann) married Maria Harris in the Sydney Synagogue on 8 March 1843. A daughter, Betsy, was born in Sydney in 1844, and another, Hannah, was born in 1848.
DAVIS, Samuel
b. 1796
Hibernia, 1819; Convict; Sentenced to life, London, 1818.
Married; 2 children (in England).
Davis picked a pocket and stole a purse containing £4 10s. The prisoner pleaded for mercy on behalf of his wife and two children. Gaol report: ‘bad character’. Samuel Davis was sentenced on 9 September 1818, and was transported for theft.
A conditional pardon was issued on 3 October 1837 and a free pardon on 29 October 1839.
OBSP, 1817–18, case 1090, p. 346; CON 31/9, no. 87; 4/4006, p. 293; CP 531; Free Pardon no. 490.
Ruddy complexion, brown hair, hazel grey eyes. Scar inside left eyebrow, scar on top of nose and on the back of his right hand. No previous conviction. Can read and write. Samuel Davis and Edmund Simmons stole the silver from the ark of the Ashkenazi Synagogue in Duke's Place (valued at £33). Davis and his nephew Sol recruited Simmons and Wilkinson (two sailors) to help them break into the building. Davis and Simmons did the actual stealing. Davis was seventeen at the time of the trial and on 6 January 1831 received a sentence of seven years. Simmons was twenty-four and was sentenced to fourteen years transportation.
There were two men named Samuel Davis in Goulburn and the community did not forget that this particular Samuel Davis had been sent out for robbing a synagogue. He was therefore nicknamed ‘Thieving Davis’ and, on 23 November 1844, this Samuel was charged with having false weights in his possession.
Samuel Davis was the youngest son in a family of twelve children. His father was Jacob (John) Davis, a hatter, and his mother Maria Davis (q.v.) (née Joel). His mother and eldest sister Dinah, with her husband Isaac Levey (q.v.) arrived in Sydney on the Hercules in 1835.
Samuel Davis was assigned to R. M. Campbell of Argyle and received a ticket of leave on 19 April 1836. He had been in the District of Goulburn from November 1835. Samuel Davis was listed in the General Return of Convicts in New South Wales as holding both a ticket of leave and a certificate of freedom, which had been issued in 1838. Samuel Davis settled in Sydney and married Frances Burnett on 26 February 1842. He died on 26 December 1892 at the home of his niece, Sarah Solomon, daughter of his sister Caroline.
OBSP, 1830–31, case 414, p. 202f.; Printed Indent, p. 65; TL 4/4103, 36/784; CF 38/460; Indent 4/4016, 31/1157; CS 38/0460, p. 132.
DAVIS, Samuel
b. Southwark, 1828–1903
1845; Free.
Dealer; 10 children.
Born on 12 May 1828 at Fishmonger Alley in the southeast of London, Samuel Davis was the son of Mordecai (Mark) Davis and Hannah (née Nathan). Mordecai had been born in Posen and was a cigar-maker. The family arrived in London in 1815, where seven children were born. Samuel was the third son and fourth child. Samuel Davis's older brother, David Davis (q.v.), arrived in Sydney in 1843, and his sister Annie (who married into the Brodziak family) and brother Coleman (q.v.) also migrated to Australia.
Samuel Davis emigrated to Australia in 1845, and set about opening a small jewellery store in George Street, only to have his store burgled on the eve of its opening. Samuel joined his older brother David in business but soon moved to Goulburn. In 1849 Davis was advertising in the Goulburn Herald as a watchmaker and jeweller at both the Australian Store in Auburn Street and at 475 George Street, Sydney.
On 20 May 1850 Samuel Davis married Sarah Phillips at the home of Samuel Benjamin (q.v.) in Goulburn. It was the town's first Jewish marriage. The bride was the second daughter of Barnett Aaron Phillips and his wife Clara (qq.v.). Samuel and Sarah had two children in Goulburn, Frances (Fanny) (1851), and Phillip Cecil (1852), and two children at 191 George Street, Sydney, Hannah and Gustavus Alexander (1856). Mark (September, 1856) was born at 360 George Street, Sydney.
The family moved to Brisbane where Samuel was part of the small Jewish community. In 1862 Samuel Davis built a mansion at North Quay in Brisbane called Rosalie Villa. Five more children of Samuel and Sarah were born in Brisbane. They were Clara (1861), Adelina Rebecca (1864), Kate Victoria (1866), Maurice Alfred (1868), and Raphael Lewin (1870).
In 1883 Samuel and Sarah returned to Sydney and built a mansion named Saraville at 29 Challis Avenue, Potts Point. Samuel died at this residence on 11 August 1903 and was buried at Rookwood. Sarah died on 27 January 1906, aged seventy-six.
AJJHS, vol. 14, no. 2 (1998), p. 362; Sydney Morning Herald, 15 May 1843, 7 October 1844; Family history from Alison Davis OAM, Sydney.
DAVIS, Solomon
b. London, 1781–1861
Providence (1), 1811; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Dublin City, 1809.
Single; 1 child.
The Providence arrived on 2 July 1811. By 1814 Solomon Davis was listed in the Muster as a convict servant living at Windsor, off rations, and assigned to Mr John Brennan. He became a dealer in Sydney. On 28 November 1828 the Sydney Gazette reported that Solomon Davis had been in court and had been indicted for the fraudulent sale of tea to Joseph Raphael (q.v.). Judge Field scornfully commented that the transaction was ‘a mere juggle between two Jews to save as much as possible of Davis’ property from the hand of his creditors'. On 19 December 1818 Davis was in court again, convicted of assault, and imprisoned for six months.
Davis, described as a dealer and aged thirty-five, married Elizabeth Robinson, aged twenty-eight, at St Philip's on 1 June 1821. A daughter, named Margaret, was born in 1823.
On 25 August 1821 Davis had been indicted for stealing £9. The prisoner was found not guilty of the robbery but was, in the words of the judge, ‘proved to be a notorious gambler cool and deliberate perjurer a proper object of execration’. He was given a sentence of seven years colonial transportation, which he served for the following three years before returning to Sydney. The General Muster of 1822 showed him to be a convict employed by the government in Newcastle, and on 28 May 1822 his wife was permitted to proceed there to join him. On 25 September 1823 he was removed from Newcastle to Port Macquarie. Davis was issued with a certificate of freedom on 26 August 1828. In the 1828 Census he was listed as a ‘Protestant’ who worked as a carrier at John Weller's, Philip Street, Sydney. In that same year, on 10 October 1828, the Sydney Gazette published the warning, that ‘Mr James Elder, owner of the house no. 11 Pitt St, lately occupied by one Solomon Davis, hereby gives notice that the said Solomon Davis has no legal interest in the said house whatsoever’.
Davis became a dealer with a shop in East Market Street. In 1832 he applied for an assigned convict servant and obtained one. He was permitted to take out an auctioneer's licence in June 1834. In 1839 he was listed as a ‘dealer’ of Druitt Street and by 1834 he had moved to Liverpool Street. Davis donated £5 to the York Street Synagogue building fund. In 1842 he was listed as the owner of a shop in Kent Street and therefore eligible to be on the first voters' list for the Sydney Municipal Council elections. On 2 June 1842, a victim of the economic depression, he was listed as insolvent. He was buried in Sydney as a Jew on 13 May 1861, aged eighty.
1814 Muster, A1225; CF 4/4425, no. 188, and 28/0779; CS 4/3505, p. 343; Sydney Gazette, 10 October 1818, 25 November 1818, 19 December 1818, 25 August 1821, 5 June 1834.
DAVISON, Rebecca (DAVIDSON)
c. 1764–1805
Lady Penrhyn, 1788; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1786.
Married; Needle-worker.
Rebecca was placed on board the Lady Penrhyn on 6 January 1787. The documents that acompanied her to the ship stated that she was the wife of a Robert Davidson. There is circumstantial evidence that she was Jewish. Rebecca was tried at the Old Bailey at the sessions that began on 25 October 1786, together with fellow prostitute Sarah Burdo (q.v.) for having stolen £3 13s 6d from a man they had taken to the Jewish-owned Jerusalem Tavern in the East End.
John Nicol, a steward on another ship of the First Fleet, tells a story about ‘a number of Jewesses’, led by a woman called Sarah, who tricked the inhabitants of Tenerife into giving them food by brandishing a cruxifix at them. They may well have used their knowledge of the Spanish-Jewish dialect to communicate with the people on shore.
At Sydney Cove a literate ‘Rebecka Davison’ married William Holmes on 17 February 1788. On 14 February 1789 both husband and wife were sent to Norfolk Island where she earned her living by dressmaking. Holmes left the island for the mainland in May 1792 and Davison left for Port Jackson on 7 November 1794. A fellow convict married Rebecca in 1801 and her death was reported by the Sydney Gazette on 12 February 1805.
OBSP, 1785–86, case 811, p. 1270; M. Gillen, The Founders of Australia, p. 100f.
De METZ, Andrew Louis
1762–1852
Sir Joseph Banks, 1833; Free.
Married; Broker; 6 children.
Andrew De Metz arrived with his family on the brig Sir Joseph Banks on 15 December 1833 (cabin class). He was sixty-one, his wife Ann (q.v.) was fifty-six, and his six daughters were Esther, aged twenty-two, Julia, aged twenty, Angelina, aged nineteen, Matilda, aged seventeen, Isabella, aged sixteen and Rosetta, aged fourteen. De Metz was a broker, who established Cleveland House—a Seminary for Young Ladies, which was announced on 30 December 1833 and opened on 12 February 1834. Terms were £60 per annum. Day boarders could be accepted. Cleveland House was close to the Devonshire Street Jewish burial ground.
In 1843 W. C. Wentworth put to the Legislative Council a bill that attempted to limit the rate of interest. In so doing, Wentworth uncharacteristically denounced the ‘Jews and Companies of Usurers [who] had poured into the Colony from all parts of the world’. Andrew De Metz wrote to the Sydney Herald: ‘I was in hope in these enlightened days such inappropriate allusions would not have escaped the lips of a senator of such high standing as a whole community to be held up in these days in a Legislative Assembly to derision and scorn! Look at the conduct of the Jews wherever they reside, both as to the moral and religious conduct’. Later that same year Andrew Louis De Metz was declared ‘insolvent’ (4 November 1843), with debts of £6555 and personal assets of £47.
Of Andrew and Ann's children, Matilda married Moses Brown (q.v.) on 23 July 1834, Julia married Lawrence Spyer (q.v.) on 30 December 1835, Rosetta married Stephen Spyer (q.v.) on 8 January 1840, and Isabella died on 30 March 1844. Andrew De Metz died in Sydney on 8 February 1852; his wife Ann died in 1860. Andrew, Ann and Isabella were buried at the Devonshire Street cemetery and subsequently transferred to Raphael's Ground cemetery.
Ship Indent 4/5205; Australasian Chronicle, 4 November 1833; Sydney Record, 24 January 1844; M. Z. Forbes, ‘The Saga of the Cohens’, AJJHS, vol. 10, no. 3 (1988), p. 183.
De METZ, Ann
b. London, 1777–1860
Sir Joseph Banks, 1833; Free.
Married; 6 children.
Ann came to Australia with her husband, Andrew De Metz (q.v.), and their children. She died in Sydney in 1860, aged eighty-three.
DIAS, Julia
b. London, 1808–1841
Roslin Castle (2), 1830; Convict; Sentenced to 14 years, Middlesex, 1829.
Single; Kitchen maid; Height: 152 cm.
Dark sallow complexion, dark brown eyes, dark hair. Could neither read nor write. SL\E tattooed on left arm. Jewess. Julia Dias was working as a prostitute. A female accomplice stole a client's trousers and his money. She was sentenced on 3 December 1829.
Julia Dias arrived in New South Wales on 29 June 1830 and was assigned to Agnes Simmons, George Street, Sydney. On 21 March 1831 she was found to be absent without leave while in the service of Moses Joseph (q.v.). She was sentenced to spend a month in the cells at the Female Factory and then returned to service. On 23 May 1831, while working for Mrs Bushell, she was punished for being ‘insolent and absconding’, and returned to the government to be sent to the Female Factory for three months. She was married on 27 August 1831, by the Rev. Richard Hills of Sydney, to Thomas Francis, aged forty-seven, who came as a convict on the Isabella with a life sentence, and who had a ticket of leave. Julia received a ticket of leave in April 1839. This was cancelled when ‘Julia Dyas’ was admitted to the Darlinghurst Gaol in December 1840 and sent to spend three months at the Female Factory in Parramatta for ‘Drunkenness’. She was described as a ‘servant’ and was released in September 1840. Julia Dias died at the Parramatta Hospital on 3 February 1841.
OBSP, 1829–30, case 228, p. 83; Printed Indent, 1830, p. 177, no. 30, 28430–88; X824, 23 May 1831; Permission to Marry Book, 4/4512, no. 236; TL 39/695, 4/4127; Parramatta Gaol Record Book 4/6543, no. 2449; Convict Death Register, COD 16.
DIAS, Rebecca
b. London, 1794–1857
Northampton, 1815; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1814.
Single; Servant; Height: 146 cm.
Dark sallow complexion, dark hair, dark eyes. Rebecca was a servant of Hyam Lewis. On 4 June 1814 she stole a quantity of her master's clothes and attempted to dispose of them in the Horse and Leaping Bar in Whitechapel. She was sentenced to transportation at the London Gaol Delivery, on 6 July 1814, for seven years. Rebecca was sentenced (and deported) together with Catherine Ruben (q.v.).
Rebecca Dias arrived on 18 June 1815 and on 23 June was sent on to the Female Factory at Parramatta. She worked as an assigned servant to S. Pugh. A ticket of leave was granted in 1817 and a certificate of freedom on 3 November 1825. Dias married William Wells on 21 July 1817, as ‘Dryas’, at St Luke's, Liverpool. Their children were William (1816), Susannah (1820), Joseph (1821), and Ester (1824), who was admitted to the Orphan School on 24 July 1828. Wells was murdered on 22 September 1823 at the age of fifty-five, and Rebecca gave evidence at the trial of the three men accused of the crime. A certificate of freedom was authorised on 24 November 1830.
Rebecca married David Rigby in Sydney in 1831. The Rev. Richard Hill officiated. Rigby had come to New South Wales as a convict on the Admiral Gambier with a life sentence. Rebecca was buried as a Jew in Sydney in 1857.
OBSP, 1815–16, case 565, p. 306f.; Ship Indent 4/4005; Permission to Marry Books 4/4508, no. 301, and 4/3496, p. 225; CF, TL, 4/4303; HO 10/9; CF 017/4589: CF 30/0843.
DIAS, Solomon
b. London, 1803–1872
Royal Charlotte, 1825; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, London, 1824.
Single; Pencil-maker; Height: 164 cm.
Dark sallow and pock-pitted complexion. Black hair, hazel eyes. Barnett Lyons (Bennett Lyon, q.v.) and Solomon Dias of Houndsditch stole a basket of laundry. One spoke to the laundryman while the other stole from his barrow. They were ‘well known’ to the police but two weeks passed before they were caught.
Dias was initially sent to the District of Hawkesbury as an assigned servant at Wilberforce to Robert Farlow, where he was counted in the 1828 Census. Dias was granted a ticket of leave in 1829 and a certificate of freedom on 27 September 1831.
Solomon Dias died at Berrima in 1872.
OBSP, 1823–24, case 1200, p. 437; Bigge Appendix, A2130, p. 95; 4/4073, TL 29/930; 4/4010, p. 101; CF 31/0923; Sydney Herald, 3 October 1831.
DYTE, Edward
b. London, 1809–1887
Brothers, 1833; Free.
Single; Pen and quill manufacturer.
Edward Dyte was the grandson of David Moses Dyte and Hannah (née Lazarus) and brother of Charles. On 15 May 1800, George III went to the Drury Lane Theatre. David Moses Dyte was said to have pulled down on the arm of a would-be assassin (Hadfield), and two bullets missed their mark. (A number of others claimed credit for the same act.) Nevertheless, after 1802, he was listed in the Imperial Calendar as ‘Purveyor of Pen and Quills to the Royal Household’.
Edward Dyte became postmaster at Maitland. On 23 September 1843 he was placed in gaol and committed for trial. He was discharged from the gaol on 18 March 1844. The Newcastle Gaol Entrance and Description Book 1841–1845 records that he was imprisoned during this period. Edward Dyte went to the Victorian goldfields, where he became a commission agent and the town crier, being known as ‘Billy Lungs’. In the earliest years of the St Kilda Hebrew Congregation he became assistant to the minister and was subsequently appointed sexton. Edward Dyte died at St Kilda in 1887.
Edward Dyte's brother, Charles, arrived in Ballarat during the gold rush and became one of the best-known characters in the city. An auctioneer, enthusiastic mason, secretary of the fire brigade, and president, and often lay minister, of the Ballarat Hebrew Congregation, Charles Dyte represented Ballarat East in the Victorian Legislative Assembly from 1864 to 1871.
Newcastle Gaol Entrance and Description Book, 1841–1845, no. 682, 2/2008; Maitland Mercury, 14 October 1843.