SOLOMON, John (Jackey the Jew)
b. London, 1783–1853
Larkins (1), 1817; Convict; Sentenced to 14 years, Kent, 1817.
Single; Dealer; 7 children.
John Solomon was granted a ticket of leave on 10 November 1824 and a conditional pardon on 28 November 1825. He was well known around Sydney Town, having the nickname ‘Jackey the Jew’, according to the Sydney Gazette (22 December 1825). On 1 April 1830 the Sydney Gazette reported that:
John Solomon, or Jackey the Jew, as he is commonly called, has been lately up before the police on two distinct charges of breach of peace. First, an assault on Saul Lyons [q.v.] in George Street at which instance Jackey was committed to take trial at Quarter Sessions. Then a complaint by Mrs Reynolds about his behaviour to her and her family and Jackey was held in sureties to be of good behaviour for the next twelve months.
By 1831 Solomons was included in the general list of licences issued for public houses in Sydney. He owned the Hole in the Wall in Pitt Street and in 1833 was the holder of a licence for the Barley Mow Inn of Castlereagh Street. He was allotted an assigned convict servant. John Solomon pledged £25 to the Sydney Synagogue building appeal in 1839. In 1841 he held the licence for the Albion Inn, which held a night licence to be open until 9 p.m.
John Solomon married Matilda Maria Hopwood at St John's, Parramatta. In 1841 the Albion Hotel in Darling Harbour burned down and Solomon appealed for financial help, saying he had seven children, had been in business for twenty years in Sydney, and was now completely ruined. A subscription list was organised by George Robert Nichols (the grandson of Esther Abrahams (q.v.) and a prominent solicitor), Moses Joseph (q.v.) and (brother-in-law) Charles Smith. Solomon was able to open a new public house called the Star in the East in 1843 in premises formerly known as the Australian Auction Company's rooms. The hotel was renamed the Albion Hotel but, by January 1844, Solomon was again insolvent. He was a member of the York Street Synagogue in 1845.
Ship Indent 4/5205; Australian, 20 October 1835, 20 March 1841; Sydney Gazette, 1 April 1830, 22 June 1837, 4 March 1841; Monitor, 29 October 1841; Australasian Chronicle, 6 March 1841; Sydney Morning Herald, 13 April 1843, 13 July 1843.
SOLOMON, John
b. 1783
Ann, 1833; Free.
Married; Dealer.
John Solomon, and his wife Sarah (q.v.), were reported to have arrived in Sydney on 13 November 1833 on the Ann, together with their son Israel Solomon (q.v.) and daughter-in-law Sarah (q.v.). John Solomon was aged fifty and his wife Sarah was forty.
In 1835 Solomon advertised that he was the ship's agent for the Champion bound for Hobart Town. At that time he lived on the corner of Market Street and York Street.
The Cumberland Times, 29 November 1845, announced that John Solomon had ‘the Cheapest Wine and Spirit Store in Parramatta’, located at Harris Street, near the steamer wharf.
Sydney Morning Herald, 15 November 1833.
SOLOMON, John
b. London, 1807–1889
Australia, 1828; Free.
Single; Dealer.
John Solomon was a son of Isaac (Ikey) Solomon (q.v.) and Ann Solomon (q.v.), and the brother of Moses (q.v.), Anne (Nancy) (q.v.), David (q.v.), Sarah (q.v.) and Mark (q.v.). On 26 September 1828 John Solomon, a free settler who had arrived on the ship Australia, had commenced business in George Street, Sydney, as a merchant in partnership with his brother Moses Solomon. The 1828 Census listed John Wilson, aged forty-seven, as a servant to John Solomon. The Solomons wrote to the authorities about their mother, Ann Solomon, who was ‘a Crown Prisoner at Hobart Town with a young and large family of Infant children, four in number exclusive of his brother and petitioner’. John said that he was about to proceed to Hobart Town ‘to take his mother off government stores and hoped to get permission to bring the young family to Sydney’. The official note on the petition reads ‘Cannot be done’.
Nevertheless, John and Moses Solomon moved to Hobart Town, sailing from Sydney on the same ship that had brought their mother and younger siblings to Van Diemen's Land. (The captain of the Mermaid had obtained permission to make a commercial journey between Sydney and Hobart Town.) In late 1829 the two brothers hired the barrister William Tice Gellibrand to prevent their father being deported to England, where it seemed he would be executed. The action delayed Ikey's deportation by some months. On 26 June 1830 they placed an advertisement in the Hobart Town Courier announcing that John Solomon had just landed from the schooner Active with ‘clothes, cottons, etc and sugar’. All sorts of colonial produce would be taken in exchange. His business was being conducted in Liverpool Street opposite the White Horse Inn. By April 1831 John Solomon announced an evening sale at his Tasmanian Auction and Commission Mart in Liverpool Street. He was licensed as an auctioneer on 14 January 1832 and later that year received a licence for the William IV Hotel in Liverpool Street. On 26 April 1833 he received a government grant of ‘11 perches’ at the corner of Goderich Street and Bathurst Street, Hobart Town. On 1 February 1834 John Solomon arrived in Port Jackson on the Fame. He was described as a ‘dealer from Van Diemen's Land’, and remained in New South Wales advertising in the Sydney Gazette that he had established ‘a stationery warehouse and circulating library’. He also sold ‘guns and pistols, violins and flutes, veterinary and surgeons instruments and Greek portraits’.
Solomon was in Bathurst when the gold rush began.‘John Solomon & Co’ was able to buy 48 pounds weight of raw gold for £1800. Back in Sydney as a well-known and shrewd bullion buyer, he published the Gold Circular, which listed the news from the goldfields together with the price of gold in Melbourne and Sydney.
In 1871 John Solomon took a leading part in the purchase of land for the Great Synagogue in Castlereagh Street. Solomon dealt in property and built a number of the commercial buildings in the City of Sydney.
John Solomon JP of Alberto Terrace, Darlinghurst Road, ‘merchant and gold bullion broker’, died on 25 July 1889. His tombstone adds quaintly: ‘Here lies a man who slept seven days’. His Hebrew name was Ya'akov the son of Yitzhak. He left an estate of £180 993. A fine portrait of John Solomon by the colonial artist Richard Noble is in the possession of the Jewish Museum of Australia, in Melbourne, and a companion portrait of his wife Elizabeth is owned by the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Petition CS 4/1993, 28/7647, dated 26 September 1828; CSO 1/295/7163, p. 161; Hobart Town Courier, 23 April 1831, 26 June 1830, 23 April 1831, 14 January 1832, 21 September 1832, 26 April 1833; M. Z. Forbes, ‘The Jews of New South Wales and the Gold Rushes’, AJJHS, vol. 12, no. 2 (1994), p. 298f.
SOLOMON, John
b. London, 1825
Victoria, 1849; Free.
Married.
An assisted migrant, John Solomon came to New South Wales with his wife Phillipa (aged twenty) in 1849.
SOLOMON, Jonas Barnett (Youner)
b. London, 1795
813; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1812.
Single; Apprentice.
Jonas Solomon was convicted for stealing three reams of paper, valued at £5, from a stationer's cart at Bridge Row in London. His father, Barnard Solomon, tried to protect his son when the ward beadle came to his home, by shouting out a warning ‘in Dutch’. His father, aged fifty, was sentenced to seven years transportation but does not seem to have arrived in Australia.
James (Jonas) Barnett Solomon purchased an allotment of land in Hobart Town on 12 May 1824. On 9 October 1827 Youner Solomon was assigned to work as a messenger at the Colonial Secretary's office, when he was found to have a silver watch in his possession of which he was unable to give a satisfactory account. He was sentenced to be sent to a penal settlement for eight years. Six years later he held a ticket of leave and, on 22 November 1833, was appointed to be a constable in Hobart Town. On 30 March 1835 he was charged with gross neglect of duty, drunkenness and permitting a prisoner in his custody to get intoxicated. Solomon was dismissed from the police force, his ticket of leave was cancelled, and he was ordered to move to another district. He seems to have learned his lesson and was permitted to return to work for the police.
On 22 June 1838 he was granted a conditional pardon. ‘His Excellency the Lieutenant Governor [was] pleased to allow this man to proceed to Sydney by the schooner Marion Webster’, and Jonas Barnett Solomon resigned from the police on 24 August 1838. On 18 February 1851 Solomon was permitted to travel to any of the Australian colonies, but not to return to Great Britain.
OBSP, 1812, p. 172; Hobart Town Courier, 22 November 1833, 24 August 1838; LSD 1/73, p. 134; CP 1746.
Face dark, black hair, hazel eyes. The son of Isaac. Deported with his brother Judah Solomon (q.v.). Joseph Solomon was sentenced on 2 August 1819. Before leaving England, Joseph gave Harriet (née Lazarus), his wife, a religious divorce. That document states that Joseph's father was Isaac Shtakenman and his mother's name was Judith (Harriett). Joseph's Hebrew name states that he was the son of Abraham Our Forefather meaning that he was not born a Jew and that, at least at the time of his birth, his mother was not Jewish. Both Joseph and Judah and their families lived in Sheerness. There were at least three other brothers, Henry (q.v.), Samuel (q.v.) and Isaac. Joseph and Harriett/Judith had seven children of whom four would survive. Lyon Henry (q.v.), Frances (q.v.), Mary (q.v.) and Sarah (q.v.). On 21 October 1819 The Times reported that ‘On Thursday last, the ceremony of divorcement, according to the Jewish custom, took place at the Fountain-inn, Sheerness, between Joseph Solomons and his wife. It was performed by the High Priest and Chief Rabbi, who arrived for the purpose in a coach and four. The husband was permitted to come ashore (from the Bellerophon hulk), under an escort, and in irons: and, after the ceremony, he returned on board to suffer that expatriation his guilt had brought upon him.’
The two brothers, Judah and Joseph, started business as general dealers very soon after they arrived in Sydney on 27 January 1820 and were sent on to Van Diemen's Land, arriving in Hobart Town on 1 March. Both had brought with them the large capital sum of £60. On 10 February 1821 the two Solomon brothers ‘informed the public’, in an advertisement in the Hobart Town Gazette, that they had for sale at their residence in Argyle Street ‘all items generally to be found in a general store, jewellery and gentlemen's wearing apparel which could be made to measure at the shortest notice’. This advertisement continued to appear throughout 1821 and 1822. In 1822 the Solomon brothers received an additional injection of capital, donated to them by the Jewish community of Sheerness and brought out by Henry Davis (q.v.). In that same year Joseph opened a branch of the partnership ‘J & J Solomon’ in Launceston and that arrangement remained for two years.
On 9 June 1821 Joseph Solomon was charged with retailing spirits without a licence and was acquitted. On 26 August 1831 he held a ticket of leave and was accused of selling 5 gallons of rum without a valid licence. The case was dismissed. On 2 September 1831 a charge of selling five gallons of gin without having a valid licence was quashed. On the same day he was also charged ‘upon five other Informations for selling Spirituous liquors in quantities above five gallons’. The case was withdrawn. On 13 September 1831 he was fined £20 plus costs for selling five gallons of gin without a licence. On 15 September 1831 the charge of selling five gallons of rum was upheld and he was fined £10 with costs and on the same day he was ‘further charged’ with selling five gallons of brandy and five gallons of rum without having obtained a valid licence, and was fined £20 plus costs. The Hobart Town Courier of 18 October 1831 commented: ‘Mr Solomon is a rich man but, unlike his namesake, not a wise one’. The question of attempted coercion of the Bench arose when Mr Gilles the magistrate refused to grant the licence and Solomon indignantly took his money out of the Gilles Bank.
In 1833 Joseph Solomon wrote in a petition:
I arrived in this colony early in the year 1820 under sentence of transportation for Life. After having been in the colony some time I received a ticket of leave which indulgence I have ever since enjoyed. I resided in Hobart Town with my brother Judah Solomon near two years which period my conduct I flatter myself was such as to meet the approval of the authorities and most respectable inhabitants … for the last six years I have resided in the County of Cornwall, the latter four of which entirely in Launceston where I again am happy to observe my general conduct has met the approval of all.
Joseph asked for the ‘high indulgence of emancipation’. The petition was written in 1833 and a conditional pardon was granted on 13 March 1833.
On 23 November 1843 the Launceston Independent reported that Joseph Solomon had been married by special licence at St John's Church, on 17 November, by the Rev. Dr Browne, to Mrs Eliza Backhouse, eldest daughter of Shortland Graves Esq. of the County of Waterford. On the basis of this relationship Joseph, who had joined the newly formed Hobart Synagogue in 1842, and had rented seat no. 3 in 1845, left the Jewish community. In Launceston, just before his marriage, he became a member of the Church of England and abandoned his honoured seat in the Synagogue.
Joseph's business in the north of the island expanded and branch stores were opened in Evandale and Campbell Town. During the 1830s Joseph Solomon's four children by his first wife, Lyon Henry Solomon (q.v), Mary (q.v.), Frances (Cottrell, q.v.), and Sarah (q.v.), had joined him in Launceston. On January 1834 Joseph Solomon and John Euston asked for a wholesale wine and spirits licence for the Bonding warehouse in Charles Street, Launceston.
Mary married William Roberts of Hobart Town on 5 November 1835. Despite Joseph's disapproval, Sarah married Benjamin Walford (q.v.), the son of Barnard Walford (q.v.) on 4 January 1838. Frances married Anthony Cottrell, whose interest in the settlement of Port Phillip led Joseph Solomon to become a member of the syndicate that originally settled Melbourne. Although Judah and Joseph were partners, the business was referred to as ‘Mr J. Solomon of Launceston’ as Judah was still technically a convict. Joseph Solomon (q.v.) jnr, a nephew of Joseph, and the son of his brother, Samuel Solomon, took a large flock of sheep to Melbourne to become one of the first three farmers in the new settlement. Joseph jnr married Sarah Davis, who was his first cousin, and the daughter of Henry Davis (q.v.). Joseph snr sold his interest in the Port Phillip Association in 1839 for £411.
Solomon became a significant land owner. He received a 100-acre land grant in Evandale and twenty acres in Longford in January 1844. He owned 1500 acres at Perth and an allotment in George Town.
In 1848 the newspapers reported that six armed men had ‘visited the establishment of Joseph Solomon esq. at Evandale and demanded money. Mr S. although he is, as is well known, advanced in years, stoutly resisted the fellows, and in the affray got rather badly used. He offered them his plate but this was refused and they finally took fifteen shillings’.
Joseph Solomon ‘of Evandale’ died on 8 May 1851. His wife Eliza survived him in Tasmania. He bequeathed £25 to his first wife Harriet, ‘which I have been in the habit of sending her’. His children Lyon, Mary, Frances and Sarah were all remembered in his will, as was his brother Samuel Solomon (q.v.). However, Sarah, the wife of Benjamin Walford, was to inherit her portion of the estate ‘only after Benjamin Walford dies’. The will was signed with an X, ‘the Mark of Joseph Solomon’. Joseph Solomon was buried in the Church of England graveyard in Evandale. His son Lyon Henry Solomon is buried with him. His daughter Sarah died in New South Wales on 18 January 1875 and was buried as an Anglican at Balmain.
CON 31/38, no. 217; CON 13/2, p. 19; CON 31/38, p. 73; CON 23/3; CON 13/2, p. 36; Ship Indent 4/4007, p. 83; HO 11/3; CSO 1/336/7708; LSD 1/75/252; Hobart Town Courier, 18 October 1831, 5 November 1835; CP no. 333, 13 March 1833; Independent, 23 November 1833; Hobart Town Gazette, 10 February 1821; HRA, series 3, vol. 4; Dixson 163b, 6 January 1834; Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, ‘Land of Sorrow, Land of Honey’, p. 13f., and David F. Solomon, ‘From Convict to Colonist: Joseph Solomon of Evandale’, in P. Elias and A. Elias (eds), A Few from Afar, p. 65f.; Moreton Bay Courier, 8 July 1848, quoting Cumberland Courier. Jeremy I Pfeffer ‘From One End of the Earth to the Other’. Chapter 8, pp 246-279.
SOLOMON, Joseph (Solomon JOSEPHS)
d. 1824
Indian, 1810; Convict; Sentenced to life, Surrey, 1808.
Divorced; 1 child.
Joseph Solomon was tried at Surrey on 14 August 1808 and sentenced to transportation for life. Joseph Solomon was frequently called ‘Solomon Josephs’ in colonial documents. He had been sentenced to be hanged in August 1796 for assaulting Willliam Brown ‘with a certain knife, feloniously, willfully, maliciousy and unlawfully … upon the neck and throat with intent … to kill and murder the said William Brown.’ On 27 November 1806 the rabbinic court had convened at Newgate Prison to grant a Get for Chaim ben Yosef and his wife Malka bat Reuben. His wife promised not to remarry during the following seven years. His wife's ‘English name’ was Molly Joseph and they had a son named Ralph (Reuben) whose birth was registered at London's Great Synagogue.
Listed in the 1811 General Muster as ‘Solomon Josephs’, having been convicted in London in August 1808, Joseph Solomon was assigned to James Mitcham for three years. He then kept the Macquarie Arms at Windsor, 1813–1818, but was only discharged from reliance on the government stores on 27 January 1816. In the 1814 Muster he was listed as a convict and an assigned servant.
Solomon subsequently wrote:
I have held the Macquarie Arms Inn for about five years and two months (though sometimes the licence was in the name of another servant of Mr Fitzgerald who is a cripple). After I had been at the Inn for two years, I used to sell pipes and tobacco and prints and calico on my own account. Mr Wentworth would not give me a licence as long as I was a prisoner. I have always been in the house and sold for Mrs Fitzgerald some of the wheat (of Fitzgerald which goes into the store) was in my name.
On 15 December 1817, at Windsor, Solomon petitioned for a mitigation of his sentence, which was duly granted in the form of a conditional pardon on 31 January 1818. In February Solomon asked the Colonial Secretary's office for a ‘renewal’ of his spirit licence for Windsor. On 25 October 1819 Joseph Solomon, a servant to Mr Fitzgerald of Emu Plains, supplied the Government Commissariat with 41 bushels of wheat and received a bill of £18 9s, which he made over to John Solomon. During the next four years, Joseph Solomon of Windsor supplied the government with large quantities of pork and wheat. Governor Macquarie granted a spirit and wine licence to Solomon Joseph for the Macquarie Inn at Windsor. The magistrates objected on the grounds that it was their job to grant licences. According to the Bigge Report, the favouritism exhibited by Governor Macquarie was the result of a good meal. On 19 March 1820, ‘A Joseph Solomon, Hotel Keeper, Macquarie Arms, Windsor supplied breakfast to Governor Macquarie’. In the Bigge Report it was claimed that a Mr Richard Fitzgerald, ‘formerly a convict’, was a friend of Governor Macquarie. He ‘keeps an inn and spirit shop in the town of Windsor, called the Macquarie Arms, the management of which, although ostensibly in the hands of an emancipated Jew is controlled by Mr Fitzgerald and his wife, who occupied a house adjoining and who are in the habit of giving orders upon the Jew for the delivery of goods and spirits in payment of services performed by the convicts’. At the Bigge Commission, William Wentworth cited the case of Joseph Solomon in support of his contention that Macquarie's behaviour was arbitrary while ‘some of the most respectable people did not obtain licences and those who had purchased liquor and built houses in expectation of having their licences continued have suffered very great injury’.
An inquiry was held into charges that Solomon sold liquor for food vouchers issued to the prisoners. He denied this accusation by explaining that his prices were higher than other sellers. He claimed the charge was trumped up because he had gone directly to the Governor and not waited for a licence from the local magistrates.
‘Solomon Josephs’ was listed in the 1822 New South Wales General Muster as a dealer at Windsor. He died in May 1824, leaving all of his estate to Abraham Elias (q.v.).
Jeremy I Pfeffer, The First Bet Din Convened in Australia in AJHSJ vol 18, part 3, (2007) p. 284f. Bigge Report Appendix, BT Box 6, p. 2637, p. 3995, Box 21, p. 3932, Box 23, pp. 4474, 4481, BT Box 2, p. 595f., on 19 November 1819, BT Box 7, pp. 3020, 3028; Macquarie Memoranda, p. 141b, A772, Petition for Clemency 4/1851, p. 196; Sydney Gazette, 15 March 1817, 20 June 1818, 31 July 1823, 4 December 1823, 18 December 1823.
SOLOMON, Joseph (Johnny)
b. London, 1819–1890
Free.
Single; 13 children.
Joseph was a nephew of Judah and Joseph Solomon (qq.v.), and the son of Samuel Solomon (q.v.). He has been called ‘Joseph III’ to differentiate him from his cousins who had the same name, and was also known as ‘Joseph Solomon jnr’. He was born in London in April 1819.
John Pascoe Fawkner noted in his diary on Saturday 19 December 1835 that ‘Young Solomon had landed from the Adelaide’. ‘Joseph Solomon Jnr’ came to Port Phillip in 1835 with the first settlers of the Port Phillip Association, and established a sheep station (one of the first three) near Saltwater River (now known as the Maribyrnong River). Saltwater River lay between his station and that of his cousin-in-law, Anthony Cottrell. Cottrell had married Frances (Cottrell, q.v.), the daughter of Joseph Solomon of Evandale.
Joseph Solomon brought with him 1000 sheep from Van Diemen's Land and he promptly lost 500 of them to the Aboriginal people. He managed the property of Anthony Cottrell on the Saltwater River. The Melbourne Court Register noted that on 14 November 1837 Joseph Solomon, a settler at Cut Paw Paw, was fined fifty shillings for assaulting an employee. His name appeared together with Michael Solomon's (q.v.) in the Port Phillip Herald of 8 September 1840 in a list of persons entitled to depasture stock. Joseph ‘Slomon’ was listed in the 1841 Census of New South Wales living at ‘Mereberriong, Salt Water Creek’. He bought the property that lay between that of the Cottrells and Michael Solomon, and, in October 1849, purchased 353 acres on the western side of the Saltwater River for £353 17s 6d. It was sold for £460 on 8 March 1854.
Joseph married his first cousin Sarah (q.v.), the daughter of Judah Solomon of Hobart Town and his first wife, Esther Solomon (q.v.), at St John's Church, Evandale, on 2 August 1838. They travelled to Melbourne, by the Henry, on 24 September 1838 from Launceston. At the second land sale at Port Phillip, Joseph Solomon bought a block of land in Bourke Street, just west of the site of the General Post Office, for £39. He also bought a parcel of 353 acres on the eastern side of the Saltwater River for £1 an acre.
Joseph and Sarah travelled to Tasmania in 1852 to manage his uncle Joseph's estate, and stayed there for ten years, returning to Victoria, and to Braybrook, in 1862. Solomon died at Moffatt Street, South Yarra, in Melbourne, on 24 April 1890 ‘an old colonist of 55 years’.
Solomon had little or no contact with the Jewish community. However, the first letter book of the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation included the following note to Mr J. Solomon on 13 November 1844 about the remains of the daughter of the late Mr Henry Davis: ‘You are supposed by us to be the nearest relative’. The grave site was an unsuitable one, having been dug in a field of basalt rock, and the congregation asked for £5 to help remove the body to a more suitable cemetery. (The body was removed and was reburied in Hobart Town.)
Joseph and Sarah Solomon were buried in the Church of England section of the Melbourne General Cemetery. Sarah died as the result of a carriage accident in 1881 at the age of 61. There were thirteen children, six of whom were alive at the time of Joseph's death. The children were: Joseph (born 1839), Henry (born 1840), Felix (1842), Alfred (1845), Charles (1846), Louisa (1848), Jessica (1850), Francis (1851), Esther (1852), Arthur (1854), Frances (1856), Albert (1858), and Walter (1859).
Paul R. Mullaly, ‘Jewish Community Involvement in the Criminal Life of Melbourne, 1835–1850’, AJJHS, vol. 17, no. 1, p. 84f.; Pastoral licence 4/41, Deep Creek 40, VDL, 45/8b M55773; V.J.Jones, ‘Solomon's Ford’, AJJHS, vol. 9, no. 5 (1983), p. 313f; Port Phillip Patriot, 20 February 1839; Port Phillip Gazette, 8 October 1844, 27September 1845; David F.Solomon, ‘From Convict to Colonist: Joseph Solomon of Evandale’, in P. Elias and A. Elias (eds), A Few from Afar, p. 69f.
SOLOMON, Joseph
b. Hobart Town, 1826–1894
Dealer.
Joseph Solomon was the illegitimate son of Judah Solomon (q.v.) and Elizabeth Howell. On 10 February 1848 Judah Solomon wrote to the board of the Hobart Town Synagogue asking that his son Joseph Solomon be permitted to marry, at the synagogue, Elizabeth Davis, daughter of Henry Davis (q.v.) and Hannah Howell.
He asked that it ‘be taken into consideration that the fathers of each were Jews and that the parties had also been brought up as Jews’. The Rev. Cohen told the committee that both would have to be formally converted to Judaism. It was also agreed that Miss Catherine Davis be admitted as a gioret in the same manner as her sister. Joseph Solomon married Elizabeth Davis in Hobart Town on 14 November 1849. He was twenty-three years old and she was twenty-two.
Joseph worked with his father Judah Solomon and, in 1854, became a partner with his uncle Isaac in a wine and spirit business, which operated from Temple House in Hobart and Launceston. Joseph managed the Hobart Town part of the business and lived in Temple House from 1854 to the time of his death in 1894.
Elizabeth Solomon died in 1892 at the age of fifty-four. Joseph died, aged sixty-three, on 16 June 1894. Both were buried beside Judah Solomon's grave in the Hobart Jewish Cemetery at Cornelian Bay.
Joseph Solomon gave generously in his will to his wife's family, the Hobart Synagogue, the Hobart Benevolent Society and the Hobart Hospital. Temple House was left to his nephew, Samuel Benjamin (q.v.).
P. Elias and A Elias (eds), A Few from Afar, p. 24f.
SOLOMON, Joseph Solomon
b. Adelaide, 1843
Joseph Solomon Solomon was born in July 1843 in Adelaide, the son of Emanuel Solomon (q.v.). His first job, after leaving school, was droving cattle for Philip Levi (q.v.) of Adelaide. He then joined his father's wholesale grocery firm and in 1894 purchased a seat on the Adelaide Stock Exchange. He married Miriam Solomon, the daughter of M. A. J. Solomons.
Sydney Morning Herald, 23 July 1845; Land Purchase 2/7974 (1850).
Judah Solomon was described as having a ‘ruddy complexion, dark brown hair, hazel eyes’. He was aged thirty-nine when he arrived in Australia. He was part of the Jewish community in Sheerness and was the son of Isaac and Judith/Harriett and the brother of Joseph Solomon (q.v.), who was transported with him. The records of the London rabbinical court notes that Joseph was a convert to Judaism while Judah is described as a Jew (whose mother was therefore Jewish). Judah Solomon had married Esther Abrahams (née Levy, Russell) (Solomon, q.v.), the daughter of Philip and Catherine, on 6 January 1805 in Sheerness. The brothers were convicted for organising a team of thieves to pilfer the warehouses in the Sheerness port. Unfortunately one of the warehouses, which they robbed of seventy-eight watches and some silver, belonged to Abraham Abrahams, the former father-in-law of Judah's wife Esther. Regardless, or perhaps because, of this relationship, Abrahams prosecuted Judah and Joseph Solomon. Esther was pregnant with her eighth child when her husband was convicted. Unlike his brother, Judah did not obtain a religious divorce before he left England. Judah's other brothers were Henry Solomon (q.v.), Samuel Solomon (q.v.), and Isaac Solomon.
Judah and Joseph Solomon arrived in Sydney on the Prince Regent on 27 January 1820 and were sent on to Van Diemen's Land by the same ship, landing on 1 March 1820. Their emancipation came rapidly, aided by £60 capital each brought out. The Solomons were able to open a general store in Argyle Street, Hobart Town, very soon after they landed and apparently ran an illegal still at the back of their store. In 1822 Judah and Joseph Solomon received a gift of cash from the Sheerness Jewish community, brought out for them by Henry Davis (q.v.), which enabled them to build up a flourishing partnership. At the same time a change in government policy towards the purchase of wheat favoured the Solomon brothers' policy of granting credit to small farmers on the future security of their approaching harvest.
The police, however, kept a close watch on their activities, which were obviously often questionable. The first charge against them, on 9 June 1821, for selling spirits without a licence, was dismissed and Judah was acquitted of a second charge on 5 July 1823. On 25 October 1826, listed as holding a ticket of leave, his weights were confiscated for being incorrect.
In 1825 Judah Solomon built a mansion, Temple House, on the corner of Argyle and Macquarie streets. It is now one of the four surviving Georgian townhouses in Australia and cost £500 to build. It was large enough to be a residence and a business and store house. It was said that the first Jewish services were held in the mansion, giving rise to its name. In 1828 his brother Joseph moved to the north of the island to establish a branch of the business in Launceston. On 27 July 1830 Judah was found to be ‘living in a state of illicit intercourse with a woman named Howell—he undertaking to send her to her mother's tomorrow’. He was admonished. On 2 September 1831 a case against him for selling more than five gallons of gin without having a valid licence was quashed. His solicitor was obviously an able man. Five ‘informations’ were then brought against him concerning the sale of liquor and the case was withdrawn. On 13 September the police succeeded in convincing the court and he was fined £20 plus costs. A similar charge concerning brandy brought him a fine of £10 plus costs and another £10 for selling rum. A conditional pardon was granted to him on 24 February 1832, even though the Chief Police Magistrate complained that he ‘held a licence for a public house which was conducted in the most disorderly, and I may say, infamous manner. His home was the resort of most of the pickpockets in town and he defied the police in every way’. On 1 June 1833 he was fined £10 plus costs for permitting Sarah Tilling, Ellen Pitt and Joseph Josephs (q.v.) to remain in his licensed house after hours. On 25 May and 3 August 1833 he was fined £10 on each count for breaking the licensing regulations.
Judah and Joseph were among the first subscribers to the Bank of Van Diemen's Land in 1823 and their names appear among the first to be registered buying land. But Judah's marital problems were just beginning. In December 1832 Esther Solomon arrived to find Judah ensconced with Elizabeth Howell and her first (illegitimate) child Joseph (Solomon, q.v.) in his new mansion on Argyle Street. Esther's enmity, following his rejection, would never abate. She began a battle to force the Governor to return her husband and to prevent Judah from obtaining an absolute pardon (one was recommended on 5 October 1843 by the administration but was not ratified by London). Though denied public respectability, Judah became one of Hobart Town's wealthiest inhabitants with his Auction and Commission Rooms at the corner of Argyle and Liverpool streets. He became the treasurer of the synagogue and donated £200 to the building fund, together with a £250 loan, in addition to the donation of land next to his former home for the new synagogue building. The partnership with his brother Joseph was officially dissolved in 1841. Judah remained staunchly Jewish. Joseph became an Anglican.
In 1850 Judah asked for a free pardon so that he could visit England. He claimed to have obtained a conditional pardon in 1832 and a free pardon in 1843—which Esther had blocked as a consequence of a letter written on 28 May 1846.
Judah Solomon died 18 February 1856 aged seventy-eight. His children with Esther were: Hannah (born 1802 and died 1864, married Henry Abrahams); Rachel (born 1811) (Rachel Barnett, q.v.), Louisa (1812) (Davis, q.v.), Lydia (Benjamin, q.v.) (born 1813 died London 20 January 1880, Isaac (1814) (q.v.), Michael (1815) (q.v.), Rebecca (1818) (q.v.), and Sarah (1819) (q.v.). His son with Elizabeth Howell, Joseph, was born in Hobart Town in 1826.
At his death, Judah left his son Isaac his home, Temple House, at the corner of Liverpool Street and Argyle Street, next door to the synagogue. He made provision through trusts for Lydia (who had by then married a second time), wife of Lewis Cohen, dancing master of Hobart Town, and Joseph Solomon of Church Street, Hobart Town. Solomon's station on the Saltwater River at Port Phillip was left to his son Joseph. Catherine, the fourth daughter of Henry and Hannah Davis, Joseph jnr (q.v.) and his wife Elizabeth are buried in the family plot beside Judah Solomon in the Hobart Jewish Cemetery at Cornelian Bay. Sarah, his legitimate wife, died 24 September 1861 in New Town, Tasmania.
CON 31/38, no. 216; Ship Indent 4/4007, p. 83; HO 11/3; CSO 5/13/3131, 16/6/203; CSO 20/30/710; Governors' Despatches, A1267-14, p. 1738; CO/280/258, October 1850; Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, ‘Land of Sorrow, Land of Honey’, and Anne Rand, ‘Temple House and the Judah Solomon Family’, in P. Elias and A. Elias (eds), A Few from Afar, pp. 13f., 21f. Jeremy I Pfeffer, ‘From One End of the Earth to the Other’ Chapter 8, pp. 246–279.
SOLOMON, Judah Moss
b. London, 1818–1880
Enchantress, 1833; Free.
Single; Dealer; 16 children.
Judah Moss Solomon arrived in Sydney in 1833, at the age of fifteen, aboard the Enchantress. He came to South Australia on the Dorset, which was owned by his uncles, Emanuel and Vaiben Solomon (qq.v.). He was listed as an ‘auctioneer’.
On 27 October 1840 Judah Moss Solomon wrote ‘on behalf of V. & E. Solomon’ tendering for the transportation of convicts from Adelaide to Sydney at £10 each by the Dorset. The ship was a ‘regular trader facilitating the communication between the Government of the two Colonys [sic]’.
Judah Moss Solomon married his first cousin Rachael Cohen (q.v.) at the Sydney Synagogue on 7 August 1842. Rachel was the daughter of his father's sister Hannah (née Solomon) and Samuel Cohen. He and his wife moved to the new settlement of Moreton Bay, and on 13 November 1843 Solomon and Benjamin Lee (q.v.) were appointed the official representatives of the Sydney Synagogue.
Judah and Rachael had a son named Moss Judah Solomon in 1843 (q.v). Their child was the third free non-Aboriginal baby born in Brisbane. A second son, Benjamin (q.v.) (3 November 1844), was born at Moreton Bay. There followed Elizabeth (1846), born in Sydney; Samuel (15 January 1848), born at Currie Street, Adelaide; Hannah (20 July 1849, who died 11 months later); Leah (16 June 1851); Vaiben Louis (1853), born in Adelaide; and Emanuel (7 May 1860).
When Judah and Rachael returned to Sydney, Judah established himself in business, taking over the premises of Philip Solomon (q.v.) in George Street, opposite the police station. He sent a large consignment of goods to Auckland in the Dorset on 22 November 1845. Solomon became a seat holder in the new York Street synagogue in 1845. Between 1843 and 1845 Judah Moss Solomon and his father's half-brother, Isaac Solomon (q.v.), bought parcels of land in Brisbane and Ipswich together. In 1846 Judah had moved to Adelaide, where he worked as an auctioneer, and where his uncle Emanuel Solomon lived. In 1867, Judah Moss Solomon married a second time, to Ada (Adela) Pulver, the daughter of Isaac Pulver.
Judah Moss Solomon served as the first president of the Adelaide Hebrew Congregation in 1851. He was elected to the Adelaide City Council in 1852 and was Mayor of Adelaide in 1869 and 1870. During 1858 he served in the House of Assembly for the City of Adelaide. From 1861 to 1866 he was a Member of the Legislative Council. From 1872 to 1874 he was a Member of Parliament for West Adelaide. His son, Vaiben Louis Solomon, would become a member of the first Commonwealth Parliament.
Judah Moss Solomon died on 29 August 1880, at his home at King William Street South, and was buried at the West Terrace Jewish Cemetery. He had sixteen children, of whom only seven survived him.
Trevor Cohen, ‘The Honourable Vaiben Louis Solomon’, AJJHS, vol 8, no. 3 (1977), p. 89f; SA Archives, GRG 24/1/1840, no. 554; Sydney Morning Herald, 9 August 1842, 31 March 1843, 2 April 1844, 20 May 1844, 26 July 1844, 5 August 1844, 2 July 1845; Land Purchases, 7 December 1843 to 18 February 1845, in 2/7974.
SOLOMON, Julia
b. Bath, England, 1826–1914
Britomart, 1835; Free.
Single; 15 children.
Julia was a daughter of Samuel Solomon (q.v.) and Rebecca Solomon (q.v.) (née Moss) and arrived in Australia with her mother and eight siblings. She married Lewis Wolfe Levy (q.v.) at the York Street Synagogue in Sydney in 1845. She died at ‘Cahors’, Macleay Street, Sydney, on 5 September 1914.
SOLOMON, Julia
b. London, 1828–1867
1841; Free.
Single.
Julia Solomon was the daughter of Moss Solomon (q.v.) and his first wife, Betsy (née Myers). Julia married Henry Keesing in Sydney on 14 June 1848 and lived in Auckland, New Zealand.
SOLOMON, Julia (née ISAACS)
b. London, 1829–1895
Constant, 1849; Free.
Married; 14 children.
Julia was the wife of Abraham Jacob Solomon (q.v.) and the youngest daughter, and seventh child, of Judah and Sarah Isaacs of Harrow Alley, Aldgate. She died on 30 December 1895.
The youngest daughter of Moss Solomon (q.v.) and his wife Leah Solomon (q.v.), Kate was born on 19 June 1837, and arrived in Sydney with her parents and some of her siblings. The family left Sydney in 1841 and moved to Adelaide. Kate married Maurice Salom (q.v.) on 27 April 1856. She died on 7 June 1928 in Adelaide.
SOLOMON, Leah (née MYERS)
b. London, 1807–1871
Alfred, 1841; Free.
Married.
Leah was the daughter of Judah Myers of London. She married her brother-in-law, Moss Solomon (q.v.), in the early 1830s, following the death of her sister Betsy. Moss Solomon died in Sydney in 1849, and Leah Solomon settled in Adelaide. She was the mother of Samuel Moss Solomon (q.v.) (born 1835), Philip Solomon (April 1836) (q.v.), Mrs Kate Salom (19 June 1837) (Kate Solomon, q.v.), and Elias (2 September 1839) (q.v.). She lived at North Terrace, and died in Adelaide on 4 January 1871.
SOLOMON, Leah
b. 1827
Free.
Single.
Leah Solomon, aged seventeen, married Thomas Thorpe, aged thirty-two, in Campbell Town on 21 October 1844.
SOLOMON, Leah
b. London, 1830–1908
1841; Free.
Single.
The fifth child of Moss Solomon (q.v.) and his first wife Betsy, Leah married Maurice Marks (Morris Marks, q.v.), aged twenty-five, on 30 January 1850, at the home of her stepmother, Leah (née Myers) Solomon (q.v.), Currie Street, Adelaide. Leah died in New Zealand on 9 August 1908.
Solomon smashed a shop window and attempted to steal a silver-plated milk pot. On 19 February 1806 he was sentenced to death with a recommendation for mercy ‘on account of his youth’. He was aged between nine and fourteen years old (depending on which document is trusted). Confronted by the judge and jury at the Old Bailey, Solomon made his plea, and even as a youngster he was eloquent:
When he catched hold of me, he says ‘Where is that milk pot?’ There was a mob came round me, and the milk pot was chucked on the ground, and the gentleman picked it up directly. I am not guilty of the crime, you may depend upon it; I do not know anything of it at all; I never did such a crime in my life; I hope you will give me hardly any punishment.
Lewis Solomon was sent from Sydney to Hobart Town in 1811 and was officially listed as ‘a settler who had been a convict’. He was granted his ‘certificate of emancipation’ (a ticket of leave) on 1 April 1813.
On 31 March 1822 Lewis Solomon ‘of Pitt St’ was ‘struck off the victualling list’ and permitted to have an assigned convict mechanic under his care. Later that year he was listed as a carpenter and joiner at 6 Upper George Street in Sydney and had an assigned servant, James (Mordecai) Woolf (q.v.). He was granted a certificate of freedom on 25 September 1823 and moved out of Sydney. In January 1824 he was paid £206 to begin to outfit St Luke's Church in Liverpool and also St Peter's Church in Campbelltown. By 1825 he was described as a ‘Carpenter, Innkeeper and Undertaker’ at Liverpool and was paid a total of 3622 Spanish dollars from the ‘Ecclesiastical Establishment’ for fitting up the interior of the Liverpool Church and the Campbelltown Church.
The Colonial Secretary's files note that Solomon visited Van Diemen's Land and that, on 17 September 1824, his certificate of freedom was stolen by persons unknown ‘from his chest’ at Hobart Town. He became a general dealer and publican of the Manchester Arms at 60 George Street in September 1826. He was in and out of court, quarrelling with rivals, taking on the military and giving evidence on behalf of his friends. Solomon was tried before a jury for an alleged assault on an officer. He was acquitted but it was recorded that the verdict ‘has given much offence to the military’.
In 1827 Solomon purchased the lease for the Sydney Market at £99 per annum and was officially appointed constable for the market. He complained that he could not persuade anyone to pay rent for using the market as conditions had not been adjusted since Governor Macquarie established it. Solomon could not afford to pay the rent ‘as the populace is not using the official market for stock to market transactions’. The administration's unhelpful reply was that it could not ‘force people to take cattle to market’. Solomon went bankrupt and was sent to prison, being released at the beginning of January 1829. He was described as the ‘late lessee of the Market’. Lewis Solomon had been employed as the pound keeper during 1827 and on 14 July 1828 the Sydney Gazette told the story of David Hayes, who drove his cart past Solomon at the market and called out ‘Look here, you Jew looking scoundrel. I've a load of pigs’. Solomon knocked Hayes down, alleging that he was driving dangerously and took him to the watch house. The prisoner was acquitted.
Solomon continued to be confronted with charges of insolvency over the following two years and was declared bankrupt in July 1831, at which time he offered to pay his creditors seven shilling and sixpence in the pound.
Lewis Solomon was listed in the 1828 Census with Mary Solomon (Linegan), who had arrived on the convict transport ship Lord Wellington from Ireland in 1820. They were married at St John's in Parramatta in 1830. Their child, Lewis Solomon jnr, was born on 22 June 1821 at Liverpool, and was baptised on 19 August 1821 at St Luke's. Elizabeth was born in 1823.
Mary Solomon died on 28 March 1832, aged thirty-three, and was buried at Campbelltown. Solomon was listed as the publican of the Forbes Hotel, Liverpool Road, in Campbelltown in 1828–32. In 1831 he was named as an executor of the innkeeper Thomas Collis snr, who died in May 1832 after a long illness. Three weeks after his death, Solomon married Sarah Collis of Bankstown at St Peter's, Campbelltown. Sarah had three surviving children from her second marriage and three from her first marriage. At that time Solomon owned the licences of the Hammond Inn, the Forbes Hotel and the Weavers' Inn.
On 5 May 1836 Solomon was convicted of stealing a horse at Penrith and was placed on the Phoenix hulk among the prisoners to be transported to a penal settlement for ‘the remainder of his natural life’ (with a minimum period of ten years). As the Acting Chief Justice said:
It is much to be lamented that a person of your respectable appearance should be placed in such a situation. The Jury, however, after a careful examination of the case, have brought in a verdict of guilty. With that verdict I am perfectly satisfied. It appears that you went to the pound and took the horse, with the chance of no one coming afterwards to claim it. As a careful experienced man of the world, you ought to have closely examined the brand.
Solomon imaginatively wrote to the authorities from the hulk, arguing that he had arrived free by the Hope in 1813 and had left for England the same year, returning in 1818. He had been a hotel keeper for most of his time in the colony. He was sentenced to transportation for life for the serious crime of horse stealing. He denied the crime and described how he thought he was reclaiming a horse he had lost from his own yard.
On 28 June 1836 he was despatched to Norfolk Island and was one of the nine convicts who wrote to the Sydney Synagogue for prayer books and other religious items on 29 May 1840. He was listed in the General Return of Convicts in New South Wales, ‘aged forty-four’, in the Phoenix hulk in Sydney Harbour. In 1845 Solomon wrote to the authorities asking for mercy. He claimed to have had no punishment record during his time on Norfolk Island and that he was ‘a steady man but old’. He was officially described as a ‘rough carpenter, not strong, elderly’, and fifty-four years of age. In 1845 the prison settlement on Norfolk Island was closed down, and it was decided to return Solomon to New South Wales. He had ‘obtained his certificate of freedom twice’ and had been punished for ‘slight offences’.
In July 1845 Sarah Solomon was indicted for bigamy and was sentenced to spend two years at the Parramatta Gaol. Sarah had married Thomas Humphrey on 31 May 1837 after Solomon ‘got into trouble’ and had been sent away. Sarah argued that her marriage to Solomon was not valid as it had been conducted in a Church of England and Solomon was not baptised. The court disagreed!
In 1855, a Lewis Solomon was listed as a merchant at 57 Hunter Street, Sydney. The death of a Lewis Solomon was recorded as 28 December 1868 at Young in New South Wales.
OBSP, 1806, case 152; Ship Indent 4/4004, p. 288; Register of Pardons 4/4427, p. 352f.; HO 10/42; LSD 1/73/195; Phoenix (hulk) Entrance Book 4/7206; CS 4/1713, p. 129f.; 4/1947, 10 September 1827, 27/8882; Petition (re: Sydney Market) 4/1940, 27/7175; CS Petition 36/5633, in 4/2338.1; Central Criminal Court 4/6448, 5 May 1836; Colonial Times (Hobart Town), 24 February 1826; 28 September 1832; Sydney Gazette, 17 October 1827, 19 April 1831, 7 May 1836, 12 July 1845; Morning Chronicle, 12 July 1845; Sydney Herald, 5 May 1825, 3 October 1825, 25 June 1832; Monitor, 6 January 1827; Australian, 14 July 1825, 9 February 1826, 5 April 1826, 9 September 1826; Clare Stapleton Concord, Lewis Solomon in Australia, Madison, Wisconsin, 2004.
SOLOMON, Lewis
b. 1795
Marquis of Wellington, 1815; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, London, 1814.
Single; Pedlar.
Dark sallow complexion, dark brown hair, hazel eyes.
Lewis Solomon arrived in the colony on 27 January 1815. Lewis Solomon was listed in the 1828 Census. He was aged thirty-one and free by servitude. He declared his religion to be ‘Protestant’. He was a labourer working in the District of Airds. There was continual bureaucratic confusion as there were two other Lewis Solomons.
Ship Indent 4/4005, p. 32.
SOLOMON, Lewis
b. 1826–1906
Free.
Single
The son of Benjamin Solomon. Lewis Solomon, aged twenty-one, married Esther Davis, a minor, on 4 May 1847 in Brighton (Van Diemen's Land). Esther was the daughter of John Davis and his wife Louisa Solomon (q.v.) and the sister of Elizabeth Davis, who married Louis Abrahams.
Lewis Solomon died at 21 George Street, Fitzroy South (Melbourne) in 1906 age 79 and Esther died at Richmond in 1905. Their children were Alfred, John (died aged 10 months), Louis, Gertrude (Solomon), Mrs Isaac Abraham of London, Mrs David Harris of Kaniva and Mrs Abraham Gershon of London. Esther (age 22) married Philip Hecksher (age 40) in 1884. Alfred (age 21) married Rosetta Solomon (age 18) in 1875 and Lucy married David Harris.
Victorian Death Index. Research by Dr Rodney Eisfelder.
SOLOMON, Lyon (Lion) Henry (Lewis Henry)
b. London, 1809–1884
Free.
Single; 13 children.
A son of Joseph Solomon (q.v.) and his first wife Harriet, ‘Lewis’ Henry Solomon was initially listed as a farmer at New Norfolk in 1831. In Campbell Town in 1833 he asked the colonial authorities for a carpenter to be assigned to him. There was no answer. Complaining to the government, he wrote: ‘I have continually suspended my capital in building and other improvements several of which I have completed. I have, at this time, three buildings in this Township I am anxious to complete’. This time he received the answer: ‘No mechanics available’. However, in October and November, convicts were assigned to him. On 21 January 1834 he wrote to the Collector of Internal Revenue wanting a liquor licence for wholesale wine and spirits for his store in Campbell Town. Lion Henry Solomon's name appeared on the ‘Loyal Address of the inhabitants of Campbell Town to Sir John Franklin’, on 10 March 1837.
Lion Henry Solomon married Fanny (Frances) Symonds at St John's, Launceston, on 26 July 1833. Their three children were Joseph Henry Solomon born Campbell Town 20 July 1834; Edward Solomon born Campbell Town 28 January 1836, died Launceston 26 July 1872; and Harriet Anne Solomon born Campbell Town 10 September 1837, died at Manchester 22 February 1868.
Their other children were Robert Fookes Solomon born 22 August 1839, Henry Lawrence Solomon born 16 April 1841, Margaret Elizabeth Solomon born 26 December 1842, Frank Solomon born 17 September 1844, Mary Frances Watts Solomon born 22 June 1846, Richard John Symmonds Solomon born 20 December 1848, Alice Jane Morgan Solomon born 23 July 1851, William Fookes Solomon born 17 November 1853, and Louis Solomon born 26 January 1860 died 10 June 1861.
Lyon's name appeared on the petition for the release from the Launceston Prison of the debtor Isaac Jacobs (q.v.). This act of mercy ended in disaster when Jacobs assaulted Solomon. In 1844 Lyon Solomon gave £5 to the Launceston Synagogue appeal. In 1845 he donated fifteen shillings to the Sydney Synagogue building appeal, and in 1846 three shillings and sixpence to the Hobart Synagogue.
On 7 February 1849 the Launceston Examiner reported that Mr Solomon had to leave home for a short time and that ‘a young man’, Judah Davis (q.v.), had been placed in charge of his shop. Davis detected the shop assistant, E. A. Watts, stealing articles from the shop and a search warrant was obtained in order to find other stolen articles. In October 1849 Lewis Solomon (q.v.) and Thomas Phillips (Abraham Cohen, q.v.) were both indicted for stealing four pairs of trousers and two waistcoats belonging to Nathan Solomon. Joshua Jacobs was indicted for receiving them. When it came to the trial Nathan Solomon ‘cannot identify’ the stolen goods, and Lewis Solomon was therefore acquitted while Phillips was remanded because there was another case about a stolen shawl pending. He was later acquitted from that accusation.
‘Lyon’ Henry Solomon died on 1 May 1884 at the age of seventy-four, and was buried in the same grave as his father in the Church of England Cemetery in Evandale.
One of Henry Solomon's sons was Edward, whose son Albert Edgar Solomon became Premier of Tasmania.
Independent, 9 July 1831, 29 November 1833; Letter 17248, in CSO 1/807, dated 11 June 1835; Dixson Library, ADD 206; Launceston Examiner, 29 June 1844, 7 February 1849, 11 October 1849; David F. Solomon, ‘From Convict to Colonist: Joseph Solomon of Evandale’, in P. Elias and A. Elias (eds), A Few from Afar, p. 70f.
SOLOMON, Mark
b. London, 1799–1837
Lady Castlereagh, 1818; Convict; Sentenced to life, London, 1817.
Single; Fruit seller and pugilist; Height: 157 cm; 3 children.
Dark ruddy complexion, brown hair, hazel eyes. Mark Solomon was transported for picking pockets. He was one of a gang of four youths who pushed against a passerby and stole his watch and chain valued at £2 10s. He was chased and caught. Jew. Scar on right corner of upper lip and a few pockmarks on his face. He was sentenced at Middlesex on 9 July 1817.
Solomon arrived in Sydney on 30 April 1818 on the same transport as Vaiben and Emanuel Solomon (qq.v.). The three young men may have been troublesome and Mark Solomon was sent on by himself to Van Diemen's Land, where he worked first as an assigned convict servant in Hobart Town. On 19 December 1818 he was found aboard the brig Portsea with intent to escape and was sentenced to twenty-five lashes and three months in the gaol chain gang. Solomon was repeatedly involved in public boxing matches during the next three years of his prison service. On 29 July 1820 he was reprimanded for appearing in a ‘pugilistic contest’. On 11 January 1822 he was admonished for being absent from church. On 16 December 1823 he was again involved in a fight. Solomon was listed as a ‘general dealer of Elizabeth Street’ in 1825 and 1826 in the Tasmanian Almanac. On 25 October 1826 illegal weights in his possession (for body-building exercises) were confiscated. On 2 July 1833 he was once again reprimanded after a public boxing match. Solomon had been appointed javelin man to the Sheriff in December 1828 with a salary of £10 per annum and the promise of a pardon at the end of four years. On 7 March 1829 Mark Solomon had obtained a licence to sell liquor and he opened the Imperial Wine Vaults in Elizabeth Street in Hobart Town. Mark Solomon was granted a conditional pardon on 12 September 1832.
On 2 June 1823, at Hobart Town, Mark Solomon had married Catherine Flanagan, aged nineteen, a convict who arrived on the Mary Anne (1). They were to have three children, Hannah (born 15 July 1823 and married Aaron Aarons [John Henry Anderson (q.v.)] in Launceston 1840). Hannah had three children: Sarah Catherine (born 1840), a son (born 1844), Henry Aaron Anderson, and Rachel (born 15 May 1825 and died 22 December 1877). Simon, son of Hannah and Mark, was born 1834 in Hobart Town and died 9 October 1894. Simon married Janet ‘Jessie’ Grant 23 November 1883.
Mark's first marriage to Catherine was a disaster. In October 1827 Catherine absconded from her husband in favour of John James and was sent to gaol for fourteen days. On 5 August 1828 Catherine Solomon was charged with ‘disorderly conduct towards her husband on Saturday night last’ and was reprimanded. On 18 April 1833, ‘Catherine, wife of Mark Solomon’, was admonished for being found in a house of ill repute. On 26 July 1833 Mark Solomon was put on an official bond of good behaviour for threatening to assault and beat his wife. Catherine was buried at Hobart Town on 25 September 1833.
On 13 December 1833 Solomon married a second time: ‘On Sunday last, according to the Mosaic law by Mr Manley Emanuel (q.v.), Mr Mark Solomons of Elizabeth Street to Miss Hannah Marks (q.v.) of the New Town Rd. As this was the first ceremony of the kind performed in the colony, it was attended by most of the Children of Israel on this side of the island’. In October 1834, Mrs Mark Solomon of Elizabeth Street gave birth to Simon. A free pardon for Solomon was approved on 6 October 1836.
Mark Solomon died on 25 June 1837. Mark Solomon had been a licensed victualler in partnership with his wife Hannah and ran the King William IV public house in Liverpool Street from 1835. The executors of his estate of £550 were ‘my friends’ Thomas Lucas, victualler and Benjamin Henry (q.v.), dealer.
OBSP, 1816–17, case 1219, p. 415; Ship Indent 4/4006, p. 43; HO 11/2; CON 13/1; CON 31/38, no. 100; Petition for a Conditional Pardon, CSO 1/611/13954, dated 21 July 1832; CP 409; Free Pardon, 214; Hobart Town Courier, 27 September 1833, 20 December 1833, 24 October 1834; Hobart Town Gazette, 10 May 1823, 11 May 1827, 10 October 1834.
SOLOMON, Mark (SALMON)
b. 1805
Dunvegan Castle (1), 1830; Convict; Sentenced to 14 years, Warwick, 1829.
Mark Solomon arrived in New South Wales on 30 March 1830. He received a ticket of leave in 1836 and a certificate of freedom on 9 August 1843.
TL 36/1030; CF 43/1271.
SOLOMON, Mark
b. London, 1825–1877
Mermaid, 1827.
The youngest child of Ann and Isaac (Ikey) Solomon (qq.v.), Mark Solomon came to Australia with his mother, on board her convict transport. Mark Solomon married Matilda Miller in Hobart Town on 13 July 1847. He died on 25 January 1877 and was buried in Hobart.
SOLOMON, Mary
Free.
The daughter of Joseph and Harriet Solomon (q.v.), Mary Solomon of Evandale married William Roberts of Hobart Town on 5 November 1835 at Longford.
AOT, Arthur File, vol. 2, pp. 482–3; Hobart Town Gazette, 13 November 1835.
SOLOMON, Maurice (Morris)
b. London, 1829–1873
Britomart, 1835; Free.
Single; 7 children.
The son of Samuel and Rebecca Solomon (qq.v.), Maurice Solomon arrived with his mother and seven of his siblings. He married Rebecca Levy on 1 September 1854 at the York Street Synagogue. He died at Bombala in New South Wales on 3 September 1873. Rebecca died in Sydney, aged ninety-eight, on 1 May 1931. One of their children, Mr S. H. Solomon, was the city treasurer of Sydney.
Hebrew Standard, 8 May 1931.
SOLOMON, Michael
b. Canterbury, Kent, 1815–1899
Deveron, 1829; Free; Sentenced to 15 years, Hobart Town, 1847, Colonial Sentence.
Single; Clerk; Height: 180 cm; 5 children.
Michael Solomon was the fifth child of Judah and Esther Solomon (qq.v.). He came to Australia with his uncle, Henry Solomon (q.v.), and Henry's wife Elizabeth, in December 1829. Following his 1847 colonial conviction he was described as being of ‘fresh complexion, black hair, brown whiskers, dark hazel eyes, large nose, large mouth and chin’.
In 1835, at the age of twenty, Solomon crossed Bass Strait to settle in Port Phillip at Moode Yalla, Yarra Yarra. He was listed as one of the pastoral pioneers of Port Phillip, holding licences from the Crown at Keilor (1835–41) and Carrum Swamp (1837–42). He worked in partnership with his brother-in-law E. D. Ferguson. Solomon's Ford on the Saltwater River, or Maribyrnong River, was named after Michael Solomon. Michael returned to Hobart Town in order to marry his first cousin Sarah Solomon at the house of her parents, Henry and Elizabeth Solomon, on 6 June 1840. Michael was described as a farmer and Sarah as a minor living with her parents. The 1841 Census of New South Wales listed him at ‘Moodi Tallo’ in the District of Port Phillip.
By April 1842 Michael Solomon ‘of Dandenong’ was in financial trouble. Two of his workers had abandoned him and had gone to work for a money lender. They had taken with them a number of sheep in lieu of payment and Solomon tried to pursue his property through the courts. It was too late and he was declared insolvent in June 1842. In the Supreme Court in Melbourne he had claimed that he was indebted ‘to a person named Henry Solomon of Van Diemen's Land and had handed over to him 700 sheep, a horse and a dray’. No contract actually existed, as Henry Solomon was in Hobart Town and the sheep were in Victoria. The judge rejected the story about the contract and the assets were sequestered.
Michael returned to Van Diemen's Land and, on 27 January 1843, wrote to the Colonial Secretary asking for a government job. He explained that he had arrived in the colony in 1829 and had worked since then as chief clerk in a mercantile firm of ‘the highest respectability’. His application was refused on 20 January 1843. Solomon obviously was out of work. On 27 July 1845 he received twenty votes in a contested election for the position of shamash (beadle) of the Hobart Synagogue, and was elected. However, the salary was minuscule and his marriage fell apart.
In late 1846, ‘after a long trial’, he was convicted of stealing the silver plate from his estranged mother-in-law (who by then had married Simeon Benjamin, q.v.). According to the Hobart Town Courier of 23 December 1846: ‘a large amount of watches and jewellery was stolen. The thief was Michael Solomon, a near relative of Mrs Benjamin, who had been in charge of Mr Barnett's public house the Rising Sun where he [Solomon] lived’. The police had taken Solomon by surprise and recovered the goods. His penalty was fifteen years transportation. After his father-in-law had bankrupted him and, after he had been convicted of the theft of his mother-in-law's property, a Jewish divorce document or get was issued on 29 January 1854. Sarah and Michael were divorced while Michael was a prisoner of the Crown.
Solomon's initial period of probation from 1847 lasted twenty-one months. On 20 September 1848 he was admitted as a prisoner at the Prisoners' Barracks and worked as an assigned servant in Hobart Town. It was noted that he ‘gained’ fifteen days remission of service for ‘extra work’ performed on behalf of his assigned ‘master’, Elias Levy (q.v.), at Oatlands. Solomon received his ticket of leave, in the District of Oatlands, on 22 July 1852. On 14 June 1854 he was fined one shilling for having assaulted Catherine Fields and on 1 August 1854 he was committed for trial for perjury. On 31 October he was sentenced to be severely admonished for ‘misconduct in having an unmarried female being with him for criminal purposes’. A conditional pardon was approved on 19 December 1854.
Michael Solomon married a second time, in a Presbyterian Church at Oatlands, on 13 November 1854, to Elizabeth Salmon. He was thirty-eight and she was twenty-one. They had five children: Rosa (born 25 December 1852), Michael (23 April 1855), Joseph Haydn (11 October 1858), Mary Elizabeth (7 June 1861), Albert Henry (20 July 1864, died 16 August 1929). All the children were born in Oatlands, and they were not Jews.
On 13 July 1854 a case involving Solomon was heard ex parte (Ward [1863] l NSWLR 874), which questioned the verdict handed down at his trial: ‘had no sufficient evidence been given irrespective of hearsay, the writ being granted, eventually on the ground that the conviction disclosed no offence’. On 12 February 1855 Michael Solomon was admonished for being out of the Oatlands District without a pass. He received a free pardon on 8 January 1856. In Finigal on 16 October 1880 Solomon was imprisoned for four months following a trial for ‘Larceny’.
In November 1848 ‘Solomon's Ford’ was officially renamed ‘Braybrook’, which is now a suburb of Melbourne. Michael Solomon died at Mangana, Tasmania, on 30 December 1899.
Deveron Indent, no. 842; Port Phillip Herald, 8 September 1840, 26 August 1846; Hobart Town Courier, 23 December 1846, Launceston Examiner, 9 January 1847; CON 52/7, p. 456; CON 37/3, no. 842; CON 16/3, p. 344; AOT, NS, 829/1.
SOLOMON, Mordecai
b. London, 1800–1883
Hercules II (1), 1825; Convict; Sentenced to life, London, 1824.
Single; Hawker; 9 children.
Fair complexion, flaxen hair. Mordecai Solomon was sentenced on 16 September 1824. His behaviour on board the transport ship was ‘middling’. Mordecai was the son of Myer Solomon of London, who had married Gittle Kalisch. Myer was the ‘minister of the Western Synagogue’ in London. Mordecai Solomon and James Argent had appeared at the Old Bailey in 1817 where they were both found guilty of stealing ten tame rabbits in Whitechapel. They were both aged 17 and both sentenced to six months in prison.
Mordecai Solomon arrived in Sydney on 7 May 1825. Upon arrival, ‘Moses Solomon’ was sent as an assigned convict servant to Minto. Moses Solomon was listed in the 1828 Census as a convict assigned to a chain gang. No religion was noted. In 1883 his death certificate stated that he had been in the colony sixty-five years, though there was no ‘M. Solomon’ in the colony in 1818. (‘Moses’ Solomon of the 1828 Census seems to be the only likely candidate!) In 1835 Mordecai Solomon of Illawarra, ‘a small settler’, applied to George Moss (q.v.) at the Sydney Synagogue for permission from the president of the Synagogue, J. B. Montefiore (q.v.), to marry Elizabeth Haines (q.v.). Elizabeth had come out on the David Scott as an immigrant, paying £5 for her passage, and Mordecai went down to the ship to carry her away.
Their first three children, Sarah (1836), Myer (1837), and Jane (1838), were born in the Illawarra District. Vaiben (1839) and Henry (1840) were born in Sydney, followed by Ellen (1842), and Joseph (1844). Two other children, Lewis (1848) and an unnamed girl, died in infancy. Their son Henry subsequently took on an active leadership role in the life of the Sydney Jewish community.
Mrs Elizabeth Solomon ‘a modest and sweet woman’ died on 3 November 1852 aged 43 leaving eight children ‘to deplore their loss’. She was buried at Haslam's Creek (Rookwood). Mordecai lived with his daughter at Eglington, Glebe Point, where he died at the age of eighty-three. He was buried at Rookwood on 11 March 1883.
Ship Indent 4/4009a, p. 197. Sydney Morning Herald, 3 November, 1852.
SOLOMON, Morris
Free.
3 children.
Morris Solomon rented seat no. 64 in the Hobart Synagogue. His name was crossed out on an amended list. ‘M.Solomon’ was messenger of the synagogue in 1845 and paid £15. Morris Solomon and Theresa Solomon registered their three children, all born in Sydney, as ‘Hebrew’. They were Henry (1850), Rebecca (1853), and Fanny (1855).
SOLOMON, Moses
b. London, 1801
Hercules II (1), 1825; Convict; Sentenced to life, Old Bailey, 1824.
Single; Hawker; Height: 180 cm.
Fair complexion, blue eyes, flaxen hair. Upper eyelids swelled. ‘Very well behaved’ on board the convict transport ship. Moses Solomon was sentenced on 16 September 1824 and transported for violently assaulting a man and his wife in Petticoat Lane and then attempting to rob them.
Moses Solomon arrived in Sydney on 7 May 1825 and was initially sent to be the assigned convict servant to Mr Wood of Minto. He was listed in the 1828 Census as a member of the Parramatta Iron Gang. On 1 February 1828 the Sydney police report of prisoners stated that Moses Solomon was a runaway from the Five Mile Station. He was placed on the treadmill for twenty-eight days. At the end of that period, on 28 February, Solomon was ‘bound over’ for ‘having abused a Serjeant on duty’. He was judged to be ‘incorrigible’ at the Sydney General Sessions in January 1829 after he escaped from his chain gang, and sent to the prison settlement at Moreton Bay for 1829–31.
On 2 April 1830 an official complaint was lodged with the Colonial Secretary by the police when Solomon, who was a member of the Botany Bay Road Party, refused to obey the orders of an Assistant Surveyor of Roads. The matter was brought to court. Solomon seems to have learned his lesson and on 17 August 1831 the Principal Superintendent of Convicts asked the Colonial Secretary to permit him to ‘sleep out of Barracks, his duty requiring that he should be employed until a late hour at night’.
In July 1832 Solomon Moses was assigned to work for Emanuel Phillips (q.v.) as a hawker. This employment abruptly concluded when Solomon was convicted at Sydney on 24 May 1833 for receiving stolen jewellery (in company with Lewis Lazarus [q.v.], who was acquitted). Solomon was sentenced to fourteen years colonial transportation and sent to Norfolk Island.
Moses Solomon was rewarded for his part ‘in the rescue of crew and passengers of the Schooner Friendship that was wrecked off the coast of Norfolk Island’. A ticket of leave was granted in 1843. In 1845 he was permitted to travel between Berrima and the Murrumbidgee with a bullock team belonging to George Merryman. In 1846 this permission was repeated, but as a drover in the service of Hyam Phillips (q.v.). A conditional pardon was granted to Solomon for the District of Berrima on 10 July 1848.
OBSP, 1823–24, case 1450, p. 535; CO 207/2, p. 197; Passport Register 4/4528, 45/660; CS 1829, 4/3828, p. 302; Sydney Gazette, 28 May 1833; Chronological Register of Convicts at Moreton Bay, no. 1719, Phoenix (hulk) Return, 4/4534; Principal Superintendent of Convicts, 4/2114, 31/6434; CS 4/3687, 39/847; TL 43/2050; CP 48/2050.
SOLOMON, Moses
b. London, 1809
Australia, 1828; Free.
Single; Dealer.
The second eldest child of Isaac (Ikey) Solomon and Ann Solomon (qq.v.), Moses Solomon and his brother, John Solomon (q.v.), sailed to Sydney in anticipation of their mother's arrival on a convict transport ship. Ann Solomon and her younger children were sent to Van Diemen's Land on the Mermaid. The brothers then wrote a joint petition, on 26 September 1828, asking for permission to bring their mother to New South Wales. Their request was refused and the two young men sailed from Sydney bound to Hobart Town on the same ship that had been used to send Ann Solomon out from England.
In 1829 John and Moses Solomon took legal steps to prevent their father being deported to England from Van Diemen's Land, hiring Joseph Tice Gellibrand to question the decree and invoke a writ of Habeas Corpus before the Chief Justice. The matter was finally decided by the Judge and the Lieutenant Governor after months of legal wrangling.
Moses Solomon married Frances Godwin (a widow) at St David's Church in the Parish of Hobart Town on 15 December 1830 and left for Sydney. He owned the publican's licence for the hotel Steam Packet on Windmill Street in Sydney on 1 August 1831. On 6 October 1845 Moses Solomon advertised in the Sydney Morning Herald, describing himself as ‘Late of the Australian Hotel’, Queens Wharf, Sydney, and of the Ship Inn, Liverpool, and announcing the opening of ‘spacious premises, late the City Auction Mart, a few doors north of Hunter Street in George Street’, and the ‘Albion Inn and Hotel’. He invited the public to view his ‘splendid and first rate commercial saloon which is fitted up in the English style. There is a private entrance to it for the accommodation of parties who may require to transact business’.
Petition 28/1647, in 4/1993, on 28 September 1828; CSO 1/295/7163, p. 161; Sydney Monitor, 25 September 1830, 12 February 1831; Sydney (Morning) Herald, 1 August 1831, 6 October 1845; CS Reports of Vessels Arrived 1830, 4/5201; Hobart Town Gazette, 13 April 1842.
Moses Solomon arrived in Van Diemen's Land on 4 March 1830. According to the Hobart Town Gazette of 13 April 1832: ‘J. Parker and M. Solomons beg to inform the public that they have removed to the house in Elizabeth Street where they sell a choice selection of groceries’. Moses Solomon was recorded as arriving in Sydney in January 1831 from Hobart Town on the Elizabeth after eighteen months in Hobart Town, where he had worked as a boot- and shoemaker. He was accompanied by his wife, Mrs F. Solomon, and they travelled cabin class. He wrote that he hoped to open a shop in Sydney.
Moses Solomon worked as a publican in Sydney, first of the Britten's Hotel in George Street (1831–34), then the Stone Mason's Arms, Elizabeth Street, in 1837, the Steam Packet Hotel in Windmill Street in 1839, and the Ship Inn in Liverpool Street. His home, during all this time, appears to have been in George Street.
In August 1839 he was listed as an ‘Innkeeper’ of Liverpool, living in George Street. Solomon's assigned servant groom was withdrawn from his service when Solomon neglected to appear before the Bench to answer charges made against him by the prisoners, who said he had not given them rations and had punished them without legal authority.
‘Moss Solomon’, a slop seller at 277 George Street, was listed in Low's Directory of the City and District of Sydney, 1847.
CS Letters Received 1839, Police, 4/2466.1, 38/8559, in 4/5201; Sydney Gazette, 15 January 1833, 1 February 1834, 5 January 1837; Sydney Monitor, 12 February 1831, 7 April 1832.
SOLOMON, Moses (William)
b. London, d. 1869
Free.
2 children.
Moses Solomon changed his first name to William and moved to Western Australia, where he worked at the Custom's Office. He married Eliza (1813–1867). William Solomon died on 26 September 1869. Eliza had died on 28 March 1867.
Inquirer (WA), 29 September 1869, p. 2.
SOLOMON, Moss
b. London, 1796–1849
Alfred, 1841; Free.
Married; Dealer; 9 children.
Moss Solomon was the eldest son of Samuel Moss Solomon (q.v.) and Elizabeth (née Moses). Moss Solomon married twice. The children of Moss Solomon and Betsy (née Myers) were Judah Moss (born 1818) (q.v.), Isabella (Solomon) (1820) (q.v.), Julia (Keesing) (1828) (q.v.), Rosetta (Daniels) (1829), and Leah (Marks) (1830) (q.v.). The children of Moss Solomon and his second wife, Leah (née Myers, Betsy's sister) (q.v.), were Samuel Moss (1835), Philip (1836) (q.v.), Kate (Salom) (1837), and Elias (1839) (q.v.).
Moss and Leah Solomon arrived in Sydney on 19 January 1841. They paid for their own passage. Accompanying them were some members of their family, including daughters Isabella and Kate and sons Samuel Moss and Philip. On 3 March 1841 the family sailed from Sydney to Adelaide by the brig Dorset, a ship owned by Vaiben and Emanuel Solomon (qq.v.) (who were the younger brothers of Moss). South Australia was in the middle of an economic depression and the family quickly travelled back to Sydney. When Moss died in Sydney on 4 February 1849, Leah Solomon and her family returned to Adelaide. Leah died at her home at North Terrace, Adelaide, at the age of sixty-four, ‘the beloved mother of Mr Elias Solomon, Fremantle’, and ‘Mother of Mrs Salom, stepmother of Judah Moss Solomon and mother of Mrs John Daniels of North Adelaide’.
South Australian Advertiser, 5 January 1871.
SOLOMON, Moss Judah
b. Brisbane, 1843–1932
1 child.
The son of Judah Moss Solomon (q.v.) and Rachel Solomon (Rachael Cohen, q.v.), Moss Judah Solomon was born in Brisbane on 15 June 1843. He was the third free European child to be born in Brisbane. He was taken to Adelaide at the age of three.
At the age of seventeen he became an auctioneer in his father's business in Sydney. Moss Judah Solomon married twice. His first wife was Anna Benjamin, his first cousin once removed. His second marriage was to Fanny Bennet at the home of J. Daniels, North Adelaide. He went to the Northern Territory and opened auction rooms in Darwin in 1873. Solomon became a member of the first district council established in the Northern Territory. The federal electorate of Solomon in the Northern Territory is named for M. J. Solomon. He returned to Adelaide as an auctioneer and a trader in sugar and merchandise. He was president of the Adelaide Hebrew Congregation in 1870 and held that office in the congregation for a period of thirty-five years. He died in Adelaide in 1932. Fanny Solomon died on 7 June 1927.
Moss Judah Solomon and Anna (Benjamin) had a son, Ernest Philip Solomon, on 12 October 1872.
H. Munz, Jews in South Australia, p. 79f.
Nathaniel Solomon appeared in the first voters' list in Sydney on 15 September 1842, with a shop and dwelling in George Street. His wife's name was Eva (q.v.).
SOLOMON, Philip
b. Southampton, 1814–1857
Craigevar, 1830; Free.
Single; Dealer; 7 children.
Philip Solomon was the son of a Navy Agent, David Solomon, of Southampton. Philip arrived on 21 December 1830 on the same ship as the ‘Rev. I. Levy Jew Priest’, in reality Aaron Levy (q.v.). Described as a ‘settler’, he was aged sixteen and travelled steerage. Solomon married Jane Benjamin, the daughter of Raphael Benjamin (q.v.), on 25 November 1840. The ceremony took place at the Bridge Street Synagogue in Sydney and Jacob Isaacs (q.v.) officiated. Philip Solomon was a committee member of the Sydney Synagogue in 1839 and gave £25 to the new York Street Synagogue building fund. Philip Solomon was listed as a voter in September 1842 with a shop and dwelling in George Street. He was a seat holder at the York Street Synagogue in 1845.
Solomon moved briefly to live at Market Place, Berrima. On 20 April 1840 he served as a juryman at the Berrima Assizes and, on 10 July 1841, gave £1 to help build a new church at West Bargo. On 22 August 1841 a son, Henry, was born in Berrima. Solomon signed a petition in Berrima asking that William Sherwin be made a Justice of Peace. On 9 March 1843 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Philip Solomon had ‘removed from Victoria Inn, Berrima, to become the licensee of the Elephant and Castle in King Street Sydney’.
In 1844 a daughter, Julia, was born in Sydney. In November 1844 Solomon was reported to be insolvent. His bankruptcy papers attest that the hotel had lost £8 or £9 each week. The family was arrested as they tried to leave the colony. Jane had been detained on board the Thomas Lowy with her eldest brother Samuel Benjamin. Jane said: ‘It was dark. I went to board it [the ship] with my eldest brother Samuel Benjamin. He took my baby's cloak to my mother who had lent it to me’.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported, on 17 January 1845, that there had been a third meeting of creditors concerning the insolvency of Philip Solomon. On 29 January 1845 the same newspaper reported that he had been tried at the Supreme Court for trying to abscond to England after leaving his shop at Brickfield's Hill without paying £9 15s for goods he had purchased. The only assets he had left were three rings and twenty-one bed sheets. A jury sentenced him to twelve months imprisonment. The Supreme Court reserved judgment and the Chief Justice recommended a pardon.
On 7 July 1845 the Sydney Morning Herald noted that Solomon had commenced business in Solomon's Temple, at the corner of Clarence and Erskine streets, where he occupied newly erected premises. In that same week, Judah Moss Solomon (q.v.), ‘late of Moreton Bay’, took over premises in George Street opposite the police station as auctioneer and dealer. In that year ‘P. Solomon’ of Clarence Street in Sydney gave £10 to the York Street Synagogue at the time of its dedication.
The birth register of New South Wales lists the following children of Philip and Jane Solomon: Julia (born 1839), Henry (1841), David (1846), Joseph, Rebecca, Rachel and Phillipa. The Solomons went to California at the time of the gold rush in 1848, returning to Australia in 1851, when Solomon set up a general store in Maryborough, Victoria, with John Levy (q.v.). Philip Solomon died on 27 January 1857, aged forty-three, and was buried at the Melbourne General Cemetery. Jane Solomon died at Hawthorn in Melbourne on 30 October 1899.
Petition 4/2578.1; Ship Indent 4/5201; Sydney Morning Herald, 10 March 1843, 12 November 1844, 17 January 1845, 7 July 1845; Australasian Chronicle, 9 March 1843; The Family History of Dr Harry Shannon of Melbourne (typescript, 1976); Audrey van Hattem, Time Was, privately printed, Perth, 1998.
SOLOMON, Philip Moss
b. London, 1836–1917
1841; Free.
Single.
The son of Moss Solomon (q.v.) and Leah (née Myers) (q.v.), Philip arrived in Sydney with his parents and siblings on 19 January 1841. He married Julia Benjamin on 20 February 1867. He died in 1917.
SOLOMON, Phillip
b. London
Free.
Married; Dealer; 12 children.
Phillip Solomon and Sarah Phillips married in Sydney in July 1833—the third Jewish wedding to be registered by the Sydney Synagogue. They had a daughter, Elizabeth who was registered as a ‘Hebrew’ in Sydney in 1834. Their other children were: Rosetta (born 1835), Philip C. (1836), Frederick (1838), Caroline (1841), Anne (1842-died in infancy), Samuel (1844), Sarah (1845), Saul and Susannah (1846), Esther Queen (9 February 1849, in London), and Francis (23 December 1851, in Adelaide).
SOLOMON, Phillipa
Victoria, 1849; Free.
Married.
Phillipa was the wife of John Solomon (q.v.), an assisted migrant.
Phoebe Solomon, aged nineteen, married Gaucher Burton Nathan (q.v.), aged twenty-nine, at Launceston on 17 June 1846.
SOLOMON, Rachael (vide: Rachael Barnett)
b. ca 1807, Sheerness
1839, Free
SOLOMON, Rebecca (née MOSS)
b. London, 1788–1864
Britomart, 1835; Free.
Married; 10 children.
Rebecca was the daughter of Michael and Elizabeth Moss. She married Samuel Solomon (q.v.) in 1814. Samuel Solomon was transported to New South Wales as a convict on the Mangles in 1833 for receiving stolen goods. Rebecca Solomon arrived on 1 February 1835 with nine children. The ship on which she and her children sailed was owned by Joseph Barrow Montefiore (q.v.), who supported her when she petitioned the Governor on 3 September 1835 to have her husband assigned to her. He was an assigned convict working in Port Macquarie for Major Innes JP.
The Memorialist having always depended on the Industry of her husband for the support for herself and family consequently became embarrassed and ultimately destitute the knowledge of her forlorn situation induced several Philanthropic Individuals from compassion for her distress and being well acquainted with the circumstances of the case with which her husband was convicted to provide her with the means of paying her passage with her offspring with the expectation that the authorities here would permit him to labour for their wants … but her disappointment in that anticipation in accumulation her miseries has again thrust her upon the Benevolent persons who knew her character and family in England.
Major Innes testified: ‘The husband was a forger and now is a cook and labourer. Conduct very good. I have no objection’. J. Barrow Montefiore testified that Rebecca was ‘very industrious and respected’. The Colonial Secretary disagreed with the benevolent Major Innes. He wrote that Samuel Solomon had only been in the colony for two years and that the request could not be complied with, ‘as it would amount to an exercise of indulgence before the legal period of probation’ was over.
By 1836 Rebecca's husband was living in Sydney and had a shop there. The large Solomon family would become pioneers in ‘Jews' Flat’, near Cooma. Rebecca died on 24 March 1864 at Bathurst in New South Wales. Her children were: Henry (Harry) (born 1816) (q.v.), Elizabeth (1820) (q.v.), Samuel (1822) (Solomon Solomon, q.v.), Emma (q.v.) (1824), Julia (1826) (q.v.), Anna (1828), Morrice (1829) (Maurice Solomon, q.v.), Rosetta (1831), Charles (1833) (q.v.), and Sarah (1836), who was born in Sydney.
Rebecca Solomon, aged seventy-six, was buried in the Devonshire Street Jewish Cemetery, on 22 August 1864 and relocated to Rookwood cemetery in 1901
Petition in 4/2296, 35/7189, 3 September 1835.
SOLOMON, Rebecca
b. Sheerness, 1818–1874
Palambam, 1832; Free.
Single; 7 children.
The sixth child of Judah and Esther Solomon (qq.v.), Rebecca came out to Van Diemen's Land with her mother Esther and sister Sarah (q.v.). At the age of twenty-one she married the 26-year-old ship owner James Cook at Trinity Church in Hobart Town on 4 March 1839. Rebecca died in Bathurst (New South Wales) on 24 March 1874. She had seven children: Francis Wrentmore (born 14 May 1840), Esther (1 December 1841), Louisa Ann (6 October 1843), James (24 March 1845), Alice (28 April 1847), Walter (19 September 1848), and Emily (28 September 1850).
SOLOMON, Reuben
1827; Free.
Married; 9 children.
In 1827 Reuben and Sarah Solomon the newly-arrived settlers of Sydney, had a child who was named David, and whom they registered as a ‘Hebrew’. Their other children were: Joseph (born 1830), Samuel (1831), Abraham (1832), Elizabeth (1833), Saul (1834), Moses (1837), Emanuel (1839) and an unnamed male child who was born in 1842.
SOLOMON, Reuben
b. London, 1804
Georgiana I (2), 1831; Convict; Sentenced to 14 years, Middlesex, 1830.
Single; Tailor; Height: 153 cm.
Reuben Solomon was convicted for stealing clothes on 9 December 1830. He had served a previous four-year sentence for the same offence. He had a ruddy, fair complexion, freckled, light brown hair, hazel/grey eyes. He could read and write. ‘Jew.’
Reuben Solomon arrived in New South Wales on 27 July 1831 and was sent to the Hyde Park Barracks for one month. His initial assignment in 1831 was to Mr George Trevellyn, and then to Chief Justice Forbes at the Hunter Valley. He received his ticket of leave in 1839 and a conditional pardon in 1842. On 12 July 1855 he stood trial at the Quarter Sessions at Bathurst, and was sentenced to five years labour on the roads.
Prisoner no. 1213-112, Indent list; TL 39/2409; CP 42/99.
SOLOMON, Rosetta
b. London, 1829–1861
1841; Free.
Single.
Rosetta Solomon arrived in Sydney on 19 January 1841 with her father, Moss Solomon (q.v.), and stepmother, Leah Solomon (q.v.). She married ‘Mr’ Daniels on 8 February 1854. She died in Adelaide on 23 April 1861.
SOLOMON, S. (Covety Solomon)
1788–1848
Convict.
‘Covety’ Solomon died, aged sixty, on 18 February 1848 and was buried in the Devonshire Street Jewish Cemetery in Sydney.
York Street Burial Register.
SOLOMON, Samuel (SOLOMONS)
b. Essex, 1774–1857
Mangles (6), 1833; Convict; Sentenced to life, Old Bailey, 1832.
Married; Umbrella-maker and salesman; Height: 163 cm; 8 children.
Dark, sallow complexion, black hair, dark chestnut eyes. A Jew. Whiskers joining under chin and turning grey. Lost one front tooth in his upper jaw. He could read and write. Samuel Solomon was the son of Moses Solomon of London, and a cousin of Mrs (Jacob) Josephson (Emma Josephson, q.v.).
Samuel was convicted at the Old Bailey on 6 September 1832 of stealing a bracket clock, valued at 10 shillings, and other household goods from a coffee house in Cornhill. In his own defence Solomon said: ‘I am quite innocent of knowing it to be stolen. I bought it off Brown and it was in pawn at Mr Walter's in Aldersgate Street’. He told the court that he had eight children and that he had lived in the East End for twenty years. He was known as ‘Honest Samuel or the Honest Jew’. Nine witnesses were brought in to the Old Bailey in order to testify to his good character. His age was given as fifty.
Samuel Solomon was initially placed on the Phoenix hulk on arrival in Sydney, being admitted on 7 May 1833, and then sent to the Hyde Park Barracks. On 3 September 1835 he was sent on to Port Macquarie. His behaviour had been ‘good’.
On 3 September 1835 Rebecca Solomon (née Moss) (q.v.), who had arrived on the Britomart, petitioned the Governor on behalf of her husband, asking that he be assigned to her. He was a prisoner serving a life sentence. He had been an umbrella-maker and claimed to be a cook. He was assigned to Major Innes JP at Port Macquarie and was a ‘special’ there. She had nine children and had come free on the Britomart in February 1835. She had believed that her husband would be assigned to her when she arrived, and now found herself destitute: ‘Her miseries have again thrown her upon the hands of benevolent persons who knew her character and her family in England previous to the disastrous circumstance’. Major Innes testified that Solomon's behaviour had been ‘very good’. Joseph B. Montefiore (q.v.) asked, on her behalf, that Samuel be assigned to her because Rebecca was in need of help, ‘her children being of too tender an age to contribute in any way towards their subsistence’. Montefiore added: ‘I believe him [Samuel] to be a very industrious and respectable man’. Governor Bourke replied that Solomon would have to comply with the law, and that he had only served two years.
Several of Solomon's children settled at ‘Reid's’ or ‘Reed's Flats’, which was later named Bunyan, and was eight kilometres from the site of Cooma. The presence of the Solomon and Shannon families meant that the locals called the tiny settlement ‘Jews' Flat’. Samuel Solomon bought the hotel the Squatters' Arms, established by Abraham Moses (q.v.), and developed a general store beside the public house that was managed by Samuel's son, Harry Solomon (Henry Solomon, q.v.). Solomon continued in business at Jews' Flat until September 1854, when the properties were transferred to his son Maurice (Morrice) Solomon (q.v.). Solomon moved to Sydney, but held an auctioneer's licence for the District of Cooma until 1858.
Solomon's children were Henry (Harry) (1816), who came to Australia after the rest of the family, Elizabeth (1820) (q.v.), Solomon (called Saul on the ship's indent) (1822) (q.v.), Emma (1824) (q.v.), Julia (1826) (q.v.), Anna (1828), Maurice (Morrice) (1829), Rosetta (1831) (q.v.), Charles (1833) (q.v.), and Sarah (1836), who was born in Sydney.
Samuel Solomon was buried by the Sydney Synagogue on 24 October 1857, at the age of eighty-two. Rebecca died on 21 August 1864. Authorisation for the removal of their graves to Rookwood was given by George J. Cohen of 10 Spring Street, Sydney.
OBSP, 1830–31, case 1824, pp. 758–9; Phoenix (hulk) Entrance Book 4/6282, no. 370; Petition 35/7189, 3 September 1835; Governors' Despatches, 30 August 1843, A1293-4/5208, p. 154; Sydney Times, 17 September 1836; HO 10/53; family research by Dinah Harvey, Sydney.
SOLOMON, Samuel
b. Sheerness, 1776–1864
Free.
Married; 1 child.
Samuel was the brother of Judah Solomon (q.v.), Joseph Solomon (q.v.), Henry (q.v.) and Isaac Solomon, and the father of Joseph (‘Johnny’) (q.v.), who was a pioneer settler of Melbourne. Samuel Solomon was buried by the Hobart Synagogue on 9 March 1864 at the age of eighty-eight.
Samuel Solomon was a pickpocket who stole a watch (valued at £6) from a passerby at the New Inn, Shoreditch: ‘He snatched the watch out of my fob’. Solomon was caught after a scuffle. He claimed, in his own defence, that he was ‘very much in liquor’. He was initially sentenced at the Old Bailey on 11 April 1810 to transportation for life. He had brown hair, sallow complexion and light hazel eyes.
Samuel Solomon arrived in New South Wales in September 1811 and was soon sent on to Van Diemen's Land on the Ruby, arriving on 19 February 1812. By 2 October 1813 he appeared in the records of Van Diemen's Land when he was convicted of being drunk and disorderly and was placed in the gaol road gang. On 8 March 1814 he was sentenced to 100 lashes for breaking the doors and windows of Mrs Winch's house. Over the next ten years Solomon was punished twelve times for offences involving drunkenness, insolence and verbal abuse. As a consequence it was recorded that he received 225 lashes, several months in irons and a period sitting in the stocks. His police record ended on 30 March 1824 when he was sentenced, once again, to 100 lashes for ‘abusing Constables Marr and B. Trainer on Saturday last and endeavoured to cause a Mob to assemble round them when taking Maurice Healey a runaway convict’. Solomon was returned to the Hobart Town Prisoners' Barracks for a month.
With his sentence due to expire, he was eventually handed his certificate of freedom on 9 December 1824. However, Samuel Solomon could not wait to leave the gaol and on 13 April 1824 he had appeared before the magistrates for having been absent from prison for several days. Solomon produced his piece of paper bearing the appropriate date and he was asked to find two sureties for himself before he was allowed to go free and return to New South Wales. In Sydney, Samuel and Elizabeth Solomon brought their son Benjamin to St Philip's to be baptised on 31 October 1825. Solomon appeared in the 1828 Census as a shoemaker working and living in Cambridge Street, Sydney. A second certificate of freedom was issued on 1 March 1830.
OBSP, 1810, case 168, p. 293 (the Old Bailey record gives his birth date as 1782; the 1828 Census indicates that he was born in 1784; and his certificate of freedom has a birth date of 1790); CF 4/4423; CON 31/38 S, no. 17; TL 13/2962; CF 30/86, in 4/4300 (there is a second CF, numbered 013/2962); Hobart Town Gazette, 16 April 1824, 23 April 1824.
SOLOMON, Samuel
b. Sheerness, 1799–1827
Prince Regent, 1827; Convict; Sentenced to 14 years, London, 1827.
Single; Silversmith; Height: 174 cm.
Dark sallow complexion, dark brown hair, brown eyes. Two marks on chin and small mark on left cheek. Could read and write. Jew. Samuel Solomon was transported for dealing in stolen goods. He was sentenced on 5 April 1827.
Samuel Solomon arrived in Sydney on 27 September 1827 and was assigned to the General Surveyor's Road Party. Solomon died on 8 December 1827, described by the authorities as a ‘Jeweller aged twenty-eight’, and was buried by St James' Church.
Ship Indent 4/4012, p. 217.
SOLOMON, Samuel Moss
b. London, 1770–1842
Enchantress, 1833; Free.
Married; Pencil Maker; 13 children.
The son of Moss Solomon and Julia (née Moses) of 30 Wentworth Street, Spitalfields, in East London, Samuel Moss Solomon married twice. His first wife was Elizabeth (Betsy) (née Moses), who was born on 30 October 1775 in London and who had eleven children, and his second wife, Esther (née Davis) (q.v.), who was born in 1775, and had two children. The children of the first marriage with links to Australia were Moss (q.v.), Vaiben (q.v.), Susan (who married Moses Benjamin, q.v.), Emanuel (q.v.), Hannah (Cohen) (q.v.), Sarah (Joshua, q.v.), Esther (who married Israel Myers, q.v.) and Phillip (q.v.). The children of the second marriage were Isaac (q.v.) and Elizabeth (who married Michael Cashmore) (q.v.).
Samuel Moss Solomon had invented the technique of manufacturing lead pencils. In Spitalfields in London he was known as ‘Shlomo the pencil maker’. Arriving in Australia on 24 April 1833, he established an auction room in George Street. It was, according to J. M. Forde, not a large business. He came from England bearing a high rank in English Freemasonry and his Masonic apron is still preserved by the Grand Lodge in Adelaide. He served in the first Sydney Synagogue committee in July 1839 and gave £35 to the appeal for the new synagogue building in 1839. He stood for election to the synagogue's committee in September 1840. He was a seat holder in the Sydney Synagogue. He died, aged seventy-two, on 13 May 1842, and was buried at the Devonshire Street Jewish Cemetery in Sydney. His wife Esther had been born in Hammersmith on 1 January 1793, and died in Adelaide on 13 July 1875.
According to family tradition, the money that enabled the very large, multigenerational emigration of the Solomon family to Australia by the Enchantress came about through an inheritance of £1000 from the estate of a disowned son of Samuel Moss Solomon. After Vaiben and Emanuel Solomon were transported, this brother of the two convicts went to Jamaica, where he married a local woman and was cut off by the family. One Sunday afternoon, a carriage drew up at the family home in Spitalfields with a West Indian black woman, accompanied by her solicitor, bearing a cheque, which the family accepted.
Ship Indent 4/5204; Charles H. Bertie, Old Sydney by Old Chum [J. M. Forde], vol. 1; Trevor Cohen, ‘The Honourable Vaiben Louis Solomon’, AJJHS, vol. 8, no. 3 (1977), p. 98.
Sarah Solomon, the wife of John Solomon (q.v.), arrived together with her son Israel (q.v.) and daughter-in-law Sarah (q.v.).
SOLOMON, Sarah
b. London, 1812
Ann, 1833; Free.
Married; 8 children.
The wife of Israel Solomon (q.v.), Sarah's children were Georgiana (1833), Rebecca (1835), Sarah (1838), Mary (1840), Leah (1842), Rosetta (1844), Eve (1846), and Rachael (1849).
SOLOMON, Sarah
b. Sheerness, 1819–1875
Free. Single.
Sarah was the youngest of the four children of Joseph Solomon (q.v.) of Evandale. On 4 January 1838 Sarah married Benjamin Walford (q.v.), the son of Barnard (Benjamin) Walford (q.v.), in Launceston. Sarah's father was dismayed that she had chosen to marry a man who regarded himself as Jewish even though the congregation in Hobart Town would not accept his status. Joseph Solomon gave his reluctant written consent to the marriage on 4 January 1838.
Walford had written to the government asking that the posting of banns be dispensed with:
‘I request you will be pleased to forward me a licence for marriage with publication of Banns between Miss Sarah Solomon of Evandale and myself by the Rev. William H. Browne according to the rites and ceremonies of the United Church of England and Ireland.
Signed Benjamin Walford. I am 21 free and unmarried.’
CSO 74/1, p. 90.
SOLOMON, Sarah
b. Sheerness, 1819–1881
Palambam, 1832; Free.
Single; 12 children.
The seventh and youngest child of Judah Solomon (q.v.) of Hobart Town and Esther (née Levy, Russell) (q.v.), Sarah came to Van Diemen's Land with her mother Esther and sisters Lydia (Benjamin, q.v.) and Rebecca (Barnett, q.v.). Sarah Solomon married her first cousin, Joseph Solomon (q.v.), otherwise known as ‘Johnny’ or Joseph III, the son of Samuel Solomon (q.v.), on 2 August 1838 in a Christian ceremony at Evandale, where her uncle Joseph Solomon (q.v.) lived. Joseph (Johnny) Solomon was one of the earliest settlers in the Port Phillip district. Sarah and Joseph had twelve children. Confusingly, the firstborn child (1839) was called Joseph; he died in Hobart at the age of fifteen in 1854. The birth places of the children tell the story of the family. Joseph was born in Hobart Town. Henry, born on 12 November 1840, died in Victoria on 6 April 1903. Alfred was born on 18 May 1844, and Charles in 1847 at Maidstone, Victoria. Louisa was born in 1848, and died in Hobart when she was five years old, on 3 September 1853. The other children were: Jessie (31 March 1850), Francis (2 August 1851), Esther (c. 1852, who died in infancy) in Hobart, Arthur (1 May 1854), Frances Elizabeth (1856), Albert Lionel (6 September 1856), and Walter Wilsmore (1859), who was born in Hobart and died at Maidstone on 10 January 1884.
Sarah died on 20 March 1881. Her husband Joseph died in Melbourne on 25 April 1890, aged seventy-one. They were buried in the Church of England section of the Melbourne General Cemetery in Carlton.
David F Solomon, ‘From Convict to Colonist: Joseph Solomon of Evandale’, in P. Elias and A. Elias (eds), in A Few from Afar, p. 69f.
SOLOMON, Sarah
b. London, 1823
Mermaid, 1828; Free.
4 children.
Sarah was the daughter of Ann and Isaac (Ikey) Solomon (qq.v.). She was the fifth child in the family. Her siblings were John (q.v.), Moses (q.v.), Anne (Nancy) (q.v.), David (q.v.), and Mark (q.v.). Sarah was the only child who remained ‘loyal’ to her father.
She rented a seat at the Hobart Synagogue in 1845, and her address was Norfolk Island Road. She claimed to have been the owner of a cottage in New Town Road from 1829. The raising of the level of the road had reduced the value of the cottage ‘considerably’, and on 15 July 1841 she asked the government for compensation.
Sarah Solomon married Godfrey Barnett Levy (George Levy, q.v.) ‘draper’, at her father's home in New Town Road in Hobart Town on 27 January 1847.
Correspondence, 8/2/408, AOT.
SOLOMON, Saul
b. London, 1812
Hooghly (4), 1834; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Southwark, 1834.
Single; Height: 175 cm.
Fresh complexion, dark hair, dark brown eyes, stout. Saul Solomon was convicted on the same day for the same crime as Solomon Solomons (q.v.), and was evidently sent out on the same ship. They were convicted of picking pockets.
The Hooghly arrived in Sydney on 18 November 1834. By the early 1840s the author of the Registry of Flash Men wrote of ‘Saul Solomon of Pitt Street that he had the reputation of a thief’. On 7 October 1841 Saul Solomon was indicted for theft and acquitted. However, in August 1843 he was sent from New South Wales to Van Diemen's Land by the Sir John Byng with a ten-year sentence for ‘stealing from the person’. He had been tried and sentenced at the Sydney Quarter Sessions on 1 August 1843 and arrived in Van Diemen's Land on 1 January 1844. A report in the Colonial Secretary's files reads: ‘was originally a convict. Tried October 1841 for picking a pocket in an auction room but was acquitted. Had been in custody on suspicion of stealing—infamous house, dangerous character’.
In a petition from Saul Solomon in Launceston, dated 12 November 1849, it was stated that he had been tried at Sydney on 4 August 1843 and charged with robbing Mr McClachey of Mudgee. He was sentenced to be sent to the Port Arthur Penitentiary. At his trial he told a long story about having walked past Mr Rheuben's (q.v.) public house and discovering a £20 note. He claimed to be ‘an injured man’. A witness against Solomon said that Solomon had ‘sunk into the abyss of wretched mendacity’.
Prisoners Sent from New South Wales to Van Diemen's Land 4/4523; Sydney Quarter Sessions, 1 August 1843, CS Letters Received, Police Mounted, Recognition Book for 1843, 4/2697, no. 1050; Synagogue Petition, CO 280/157; CS 4/2879.1, 49/11944; CON 22/4, p. 306; Sydney Morning Herald, 18 January 1845; Sydney Gazette, 7 October 1841.
SOLOMON, Saul
b. 1818 Free.
Single; Dealer.
Solomon's name appeared on the Launceston Synagogue petition of 20 May 1843. On 17 October 1848 Solomon's haberdashery shop called the Red House, in Charles Street, Launceston, caught fire. It was a two-storey wooden building, which was completely destroyed. Solomon was insured and the damage was estimated to be in the vicinity of £2500.
Saul ‘Solomons’, aged thirty-five, married Julia Myers, aged thirty, in Hobart Town on 30 January 1853.
Sydney Morning Herald, 8 March 1843.
SOLOMON, Saul
b. London, 1818–1887
1843; Free.
Single; 6 children.
The son of Elias Solomon (q.v.) and Fanny (née Simmons), Saul married Elizabeth Murphy at Parramatta in 1847. Their six children were Fanny, Solomon, Nellie, Samuel, Elizabeth (born 1850) and Alice (1854). Saul died in Sydney on 16 January 1887.
Fresh ruddy complexion, with brown hair and reddish whiskers, hazel eyes, medium nose and mouth and chin. A Jew. Could read and write. Serone Solomon was sentenced for housebreaking at the Lancaster (Liverpool) Quarter Sessions on 18 June 1836. He had been previously convicted for stealing wearing apparel and money with two accomplices named Conners and Brown.
Solomon arrived in New South Wales on 18 January 1836 and was assigned to Mr D. Brady of Campbelltown. On 4 July 1838 he was sentenced to fifty lashes for giving false information to the police. On 30 November 1838 he received fifty additional lashes for being absent without leave from his prison gang and on 3 April 1839 he arrived at Norfolk Island, having been tried at the Sydney Supreme Court for ‘robbery with fire arms’, with a second life sentence and the proviso that he was not to be returned to New South Wales.
Solomon's time on Norfolk Island was tragic. On 16 July 1839, for neglect of work, he was given gaol on bread and water for one week. On 26 July, for neglect of work, he received twenty-five lashes. On 12 August, for appearing at muster in soiled clothes, he received three days in gaol on bread and water; on 11 September, for neglect of work, twenty-five lashes. On 18 October, for going to hospital on false pretences, he was sentenced to gaol on bread and water until further orders. On 22 November, for neglect of work, he was given seven days gaol on bread and water, and on 4 December, for neglect of work, twenty-four hours in gaol on bread and water. His name was included in the list of nine Jewish prisoners at Norfolk Island who Captain Maconachie hoped to help by requesting the Sydney Synagogue to send prayer books. On 24 February 1843 Solomon was absent from divine service and disobedient of orders. He was admonished on 28 April and 12 May 1843. Disobedience of orders and neglect of work resulted in one month in irons. One month's additional punishment was given for ovalling (changing the shape of) his irons, and he was admonished for destroying government property on 23 September 1845. For neglect of duty, he received solitary confinement for seven days.
On 26 November 1845 the convicts on Norfolk Island were sent to Van Diemen's Land on the Lady Franklin. His initial period of probation was spent in the chain gang at Lymington. On 14 July 1846 he was sentenced to four days solitary confinement for refusing to work. A ticket of leave was issued on 20 March 1849. On 27 March 1852 at Longford he was committed to trial and on 24 April he was found guilty of feloniously receiving a stolen brooch valued at £6. He was not allowed back into assigned service north of Oatlands after serving a sentence of three years hard labour in chains. On 6 May 1852, at Longford, he was sentenced to a further twelve months hard labour in chains for ‘having secreted himself on the Mariposa with intent to escape’. Following his ‘services at a fire’ on 16 April 1855 a recommendation for official consideration was recorded on his dossier. On 14 May 1855, while an assigned servant in Hobart Town, Serone Solomon was punished with one month's hard labour for ‘misconduct in being in a brothel’. A ticket of leave was reissued on 6 November 1855 and a conditional pardon on 6 May 1856.
‘Sarony Solomon’ appeared in the ledger of the Hobart Synagogue with a donation of sixteen shillings and sixpence in 1865.
CON 33/71, no. 17061; Lady Kennaway Printed Indent, 1836, p. 145, no. 36-2190; List of Prisoners at Norfolk Island, August 1844, ML, COD 2.
SOLOMON, Simon (Solomon SIMONS)
b. London, 1780–1875
Atlas (3), 1816; Convict; Sentenced to life, Old Bailey, 1815.
Single; Watchmaker; Height: 154 cm.
Dark pale complexion, black hair, dark eyes. Simon Solomon was transported to New South Wales on the Atlas (3) and then to Van Diemen's Land by the Kangaroo in 1816. Solomon had a sister who arrived as a convict on the Persian on 6 August 1827. At the Old Bailey, ‘Solomon Simons’, together with Thomas Smith, picked a pocket ‘with violence’. Simons had been in custody before for picking pockets and riotous behaviour on the streets. He was sentenced to death on 10 May 1815 and then had his sentence commuted.
In Sydney on 3 September 1817 Simon Solomon was sentenced to extra labour for ‘neglect of duty’. In 1821 and 1822 he was reprimanded no less than seven times for being absent from the muster and church, even though he held a ticket of leave.
A conditional pardon was issued to him on 7 September 1829 and an absolute pardon on 6 September 1836 (as listed in the Hobart Town Courier, 23 March 1838).
Simon Solomon, who was ‘eighty-three years old, of Fingal’, died on 2 October 1875.
CON 31/36; HO 10/1, no. 2; OBSP, 1814–15, case 594, p. 272; Ship Indent 4/4005, p. 181; Hobart Town Gazette, 18 October 1823; Hobart Town Courier, 23 March 1838; CP no. 104; AP no. 181.
SOLOMON, Simon
b. London, 1816
Lady Harewood (3), 1832; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Middlesex, 1831.
Single; Hawker; Height: 159 cm.
Ruddy dark complexion, brown hair, grey eyes. Thick nose. Can read. Simon Solomons was convicted for stealing a print, and sentenced on 1 December 1831. His uncle, Joseph Solomon (q.v.), had been sent to Australia in 1820.
The Lady Harewood arrived at Port Jackson on 5 August 1832. The name of Simon Solomons was entered in the Newcastle Gaol in 1832 and he was recorded as ‘set at large’ on 30 November 1838. The 1837 General Return of Convicts in New South Wales listed him as ‘Simon Solomons’, assigned to Mr William White of Merton. He was sent back to the Hyde Park Barracks to face the bench of magistrates on a charge of ‘neglect’. He was sentenced to twenty-five lashes. Solomon was discharged from service ‘to be married’ on 30 November 1838. (There is no trace of this marriage in the colonial records.) A certificate of freedom was issued to him on 21 May 1839.
Lady Harewood Printed Indent, p. 85, no. 32-1564-91; Newcastle Gaol Entrance Book, 2/2006, no. 950, in 1838; CF 4/4348, 30/0750; Hyde Park Barracks Bench of Magistrates, X707.
SOLOMON, Simon (SOLOMONS) (Solomon SIMONS)
b. Bethnal Green, London, 1799
Morley (1), 1817; Convict; Sentenced to life, Old Bailey, 1816.
Single; Hawker; Height: 176 cm.
Dark complexion, black hair very thin on the top of his head, black eyes. His father, Jacob Solomon, was a hawker, who ‘travels the country with hardware’, according to his sister Catherine Solomon (q.v.), who arrived in Hobart Town as a convict on the Mermaid in 1828. On 17 May 1816, Simon Solomons and Isaac Jonas (q.v.) attacked and robbed a man who had just been with a prostitute in an alley near the churchyard of St Paul's. The victim chased his assailants, who were caught by three constables. On 29 May 1816 both boys were sentenced to death. The verdict was commuted and they were sent to Australia bracketed together on the same ship.
The convict transport ship Morley arrived in New South Wales on 10 April 1817 and Solomons was forwarded to Liverpool for assignment. Simon Solomon was sent to Van Diemen's Land on the Cockburn and was assigned to work as a servant to Mr Thornton who, on 7 March 1822, reported to the authorities that he had heard Solomon belligerently threaten to bring together several thousand convicts and rise up in rebellion against the authorities. Simon Solomon was sentenced to spend two months in the Hobart Town gaol gang and to receive fifty lashes. On 25 January 1821 Solomon had married Mary Gould, aged twenty-one. Mary had arrived as a prisoner on 29 August 1820 on the Morley. She had been convicted at the Old Bailey to fourteen years transportation for having forged bank notes in her possession. She was a very poor choice for a marriage partner, but they married nevertheless. Solomon had trained as a boxer in England and on 13 September 1822 he was found to have training weights in his possession, which were confiscated. On 25 June 1823 Solomon was reproved for assaulting William Garcia (q.v.) and on 29 April 1824 he was arrested for fighting and returned to the Public Works Department.
On 26 March 1825 Solomon asked for permission to visit New South Wales in order to pursue his boxing career, and then return to Hobart Town. Permission was granted. On 3 January 1827 (in Hobart Town) Mary Solomon was reprimanded for being found carousing at the Ship Inn ‘at a late hour’. By 1828 she was ‘out all night’ and, on 4 May 1829, was judged to be living in a state of adultery. Mary Solomons acquired a long record, for abusive behaviour, causing a riot, and being drunk.
On 13 April 1826 Solomon was again sentenced to fifty lashes and to be sent to Maria Island. We know that he remained in Hobart Town because, on 16 May 1826, as a result of his wife's complaints, he was bound over to keep the peace towards Mary Johnson and was fined £10. Solomon began to work as the gatekeeper at the Prisoners' Barracks. On 17 July 1826 he was sentenced to twenty-five lashes for allowing Abraham Jacobs (q.v.) to leave the barracks without proper permission and on 3 January 1827 was reprimanded for being absent from his duties at the gate. On 7 January 1829 Solomon was employed by Mrs Dinah Joseph (q.v.), only to be accused of taking from her premises £40 to £50 worth of goods while he was in her service. The informer could not be questioned, ‘he being in such a bad state from a beating he had received from Solomon’. Solomon was a constable at the Hobart Town Prisoners' Barracks, but was in Mrs Joseph's service and was in the habit of purchasing goods at sales. The police suggested the accusation had been made to demonstrate that Mrs Joseph was in need of protection and should have her husband, Reuben Joseph (q.v.), assigned to her (Hobart Town Courier, 24 January 1829). However, on 28 March 1829, Solomon was found guilty of stealing forty-nine yards of cloth valued at twenty shillings. He was evidently sent back to prison for, on 1 August 1831, he was found at the public house of Barnard Walford (q.v.) while still a member of the hulk chain gang. Two years later, while still in government service, he was sentenced for having insulted an overseer, and on 8 February 1833 he was sent to Port Arthur for twelve months.
Solomon returned to Hobart Town and did his best to keep out of trouble even though, on 23 June 1836, he was reprimanded for drinking alcohol at a public house during divine service. By 1836 he held a ticket of leave. A conditional pardon was granted to him on 11 January 1839 and a free pardon on 6 April 1843. The 1842 Census of Hobart Town listed him as a tenant of 32 Brisbane Street, a shopkeeper, Jewish and married to Mary Smith, whose religion was ‘C of E’. He held a hawker's licence, which expired in 1841 and 1843 for lack of payment. On 6 December 1843 Solomon was charged with neglect of duty while attached to the Public Works Department and was sent back to the prison at Port Arthur for a further six months.
CON 31/38, no. 169 S; CON 32/4, p. 322; CON 33/1, no. 109; CSO 1/367/8367; Ship Indent 4/4405; Hobart Town Courier, 24 January 1829, 18 January 1839; CP 1943; Free Pardon 31.
SOLOMON, Solomon
b. London, 1816–1901
1833; Free.
Married; Dealer.
Solomon Solomon married Isabella Isaac in London in 1842. She had been born in London on 5 April 1816 and died in Adelaide on 27 March 1901.
Pritchard Index.
The son of Samuel Solomon (q.v.) and Rebecca Solomon (née Moss) (q.v.), Solomon was erroneously listed on arrival with his mother and siblings as ‘Saul’. Solomon married Rachel Abrahams (q.v.) at Sydney on 12 August 1840. Their children were: Lewis (Louis) (born 1842), Philip Charles (1843–1922), Esther (1846–1880), who married Nathan Cohen (q.v.), Michael Cleveland (1848), Rebecca (1850–1922), who married David Moses, Deborah (1853–1942), who married Nathan Cohen, Elizabeth (Bessie) (1855–1937), Samuel (1857–1914), and Caroline (1859–1944), born at Queanbeyan.
Solomon Solomon died at Eden, Twofold Bay, in New South Wales on 12 June 1900.
SOLOMON, Vaiben
b. London, 1798–1860
Lady Castlereagh, 1818; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, County Durham, 1817.
Single; Pencil-maker; Height: 159 cm; 9 children.
Dark complexion, black hair, dark eyes. Vaiben Solomon was the older brother of Emanuel Solomon (q.v.) and the son of the pencil-maker Samuel Moss Solomon (q.v.) of Wentworth Street, Spitalfields. Vaiben was charged, along with his brother Emanuel, with breaking into a dwelling place (for which they were found not guilty) and with stealing coats and other clothes. They were both sentenced to death, though their sentences were duly commuted to transportation for seven years when they took advantage of an ancient ecclesiastical law allowing people who were able to read Psalm 81 to escape the death penalty. A family tradition relates that Vaiben's first name was originally Solomon, but that he acquired the nickname ‘Fabian’ from his brother Emanuel, and that name was corrupted to the more Jewish sounding ‘Vaiben’. Almost every inhabitant of Wentworth Street, Wentworth Court, and the adjacent Bell Lane was Jewish.
The Lady Castlereagh arrived in New South Wales on 30 April 1818 and the Solomon brothers were both immediately sent to Van Diemen's Land. On 2 November 1819 Vaiben was punished with an extra week's work for the government in his own time for ‘neglect of duty’. On 20 December 1819 he was found to have been disorderly at church and was sentenced by the magistrate, the Rev. Robert Knopwood, to extra labour for one week. Two days later he was sentenced for neglect of duty and given another week's work in his own time. On 22 May 1820 he was found to have been absent from Divine Service and sentenced to an extra month's work for the government and gaol at night. On 20 June 1820 he was acquitted of a charge of stealing a shirt from Mr Guest. On 28 August 1820 he received twenty-five lashes for being absent from the muster and Sunday service, for which he received twenty-five lashes. On 3 March 1821 Emanuel and Vaiben Solomon were found guilty of stealing the apparel of Mr William Copperwheat and sentenced to be sent to the penal settlement at Newcastle in New South Wales for three years That painful experience brought their career as convicts to an end and in 1824 they were free by servitude and living in Sydney. Vaiben Solomon was issued with a certificate of freedom on 5 August 1824.
On 3 June 1826 Vaiben Solomon married Mary Smith at St Philip's, Sydney. Mary changed her religion and her first name became ‘Sarah’. David, born in 1828, the son of Vaiben and Sarah Solomon, was registered by his parents as a ‘Hebrew’. In June 1832, when David died, his funeral became the second at the Devonshire Street Jewish Cemetery.
In July 1826 Vaiben applied to the government: ‘That Petitioner has a relative David Myers [q.v.], a Prisoner per Ship Almorah in the year 1817 for the term of Fourteen Years who is a Watchmaker by Trade, is thirty-six years of age, and has lately arrived from Port Macquarie … the said David Myers would be of great service to petitioner in Carrying on his business in King Street, Sydney’. The authorities suspected that Myers was not a relative and noted that Vaiben had met Myers at Port Macquarie.
Vaiben was listed as a dealer in George Street in the 1828 Census. His two-month-old son David was also listed. Vaiben and his brother Emanuel operated the Cheap Wholesale and Retail Warehouse at 74 George Street and, in 1833, opened the Australian Wine Vaults in George Street. A ‘W. Solomon’ was elected to the first committee that was established by a meeting of the Jews of Sydney on 10 September 1833. By 1836 he was working as a tailor and draper at 74 York Street.
Vaiben stood for a position on the committee of the board of management of the Sydney Synagogue in September 1840. He worked as a ship's agent in the 1840s in close partnership with his brother, who by then lived in Adelaide. Their formal partnership was dissolved in Sydney in 1844 but their friendship and business relationship—based on intercolonial trade—flourished.
Vaiben's children after David were Joseph (born 1830), Samuel (1831, who died in infancy), Abraham (1832), Elizabeth (1833), Saul (1834), Moses (1837), Edward Samuel (1839), Charles (1842) and Rosetta (1844).
Vaiben was a member of the Sydney Synagogue committee in 1837 and his family donated £140 to the congregation's building appeal in 1839. In August 1847 Mr Vaiben Solomon of Castlereagh Street refused to answer a summons to serve on a jury because the letter from the sheriff described him as a ‘dealer’ and not as a ‘merchant’. He was fined £10. His honour was worth the price!
Vaiben Solomon died on 20 June 1860 at the age of sixty-one. He was buried at the Devonshire Street cemetery and later his body was transferred to Raphael's Ground.
E. S. Richards, ‘The Fall and Rise of the Solomon Brothers’, AJJHS, vol. 8, no. 2 (1975); Ship Indent 4/4006, p. 34; CS 4/3520, 27 July 1826; Petition, dated 10 July 1826, no. 109, 4/1817; 14/3520, CF 040/2469; 4/1966, letter 28/1369; CON 31/38; Australian, 15 July 1834, 26 September 1834, 29 September 1834, 2 June 1835, 28 April 1835, 6 May 1836, 22 October 1839, 6 April 1841, 23 September 1841; South Australian Gazette, 26 September 1838, 29 June 1839; Sydney Gazette, 12 August 1824, 3 December 1828, 1 April 1830, 11 December 1830, 1 October 1831; Commercial Journal and Advertiser, 11 May 1836, 22 June 1836, 3 August 1836.
SOLOMONS, Aaron
b. London, 1779–1866
I'Dire, 1841; Free.
Married; Tailor; 12 children.
The son of Phineas and Rose (née Asher), Aaron Solomons married Rachel Davis (daughter of Joseph Davis) on 29 July 1812 in London at the Great Synagogue. His second marriage was to Frances Asher (born 1803). Aaron Solomons' name is on the Launceston Synagogue petition list of 20 May 1843. The Launceston Examiner reported that on 9 February 1844 Aaron ‘Solomon’ preferred a complaint against Joseph Nathan (q.v.), who came to his shop and uttered threats against him. Nathan was bound over on a bond of £25 for six months. He called for a public meeting to consider founding a fund for the sick and the poor.
‘A. & S. Solomons’ bought the Launceston Emporium in Charles Street from David Benjamin (q.v.) in September 1846. David Benjamin then moved to Melbourne to join the more successful business managed by his younger brother, Solomon, and, in Launceston, the Solomons soon faced ruin. On 14 March 1849 Aaron Solomons appeared in the Insolvency Court. His creditors included Moses and Nathan (q.v.) of ‘Nathan Moses and Co’. Solomon, who had a drapery store, had his furniture removed to the Frances and Pyles auction rooms. Solomon pleaded extreme poverty; he was destitute and his eight children were starving. The creditors refused to leave him any property. In an attempt to save his son from insolvency, Aaron denied that he had been in partnership with Saul who, he said, was answerable for goods worth £300. Saul had a bakery and pastry cook shop in Charles Street, which had been destroyed by fire. Aaron owed Nathan and Moses £500 and had received goods from them worth £400. Twelve months before, Solomons had fallen into difficulty with debts of £1400 and goods worth £800. The creditors had even taken away the baby's cradle.
The children of Aaron and Rachel were Saul (born 1822), and Nathaniel (1825) (q.v.). The children of Aaron and Frances were Phoebe (1826) (q.v.), who married (Isaacar) Bertram Nathan (q.v.), Leah (1832), Abigail (1834), who married Mark Capua in Adelaide on 7 April 1857, Isaac (1839), Louisa (1845), born in Launceston, Henry John, Miriam (1846), Rachael (1849), Joseph, and Sarah.
Aaron Solomons, of 177 Stephen Street, Melbourne, died on 29 June 1866, and was buried in the Jewish section of the Melbourne General Cemetery. Frances Solomons of 62 Russell Street, Melbourne, died on 3 August 1889 and was buried at the Melbourne General Cemetery.
Launceston Examiner, 9 February 1844, 14 May 1845, 17 March 1849; CO 280/157; Cornwall Chronicle, 3 October 1846.
Abraham Solomons lived with his father, Isaac Solomons, at Garden Court, Whitechapel. Solomons appeared at the Old Bailey on two charges. He was acquitted on a charge of stealing a parcel from a coach as the witness failed to positively identify the thief. He was convicted for stealing a bundle of laundry from a washerwoman who knew the accused and spoke of having been robbed by‘the Jew boy Solomons’. His father declared at the trial: ‘I am the unhappy father of this unfortunate young man. I live in Garden Court, Whitechapel. My chief employment is grafting silk stockings for gentlemen, my son lives with me but, of late, I cannot speak to his guilt or innocence; my wife died in childbed with seven children, he was employed all last summer by me … I would rather give my voice for sending him abroad; he may make a bright man yet’. Solomons was sentenced on 12 July 1791, having been found guilty of stealing, but not violently.
Abraham Solomons arrived in New South Wales on 13 October 1791. He was buried by St Philip's in Sydney on 3 January 1792.
OBSP, 1789–90, case 57, p. 63, and case 59, p. 123; Burial Register, St Philip's, 1792.
SOLOMONS, Abraham
b. London, 1800
Morely (2), 1818; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Surrey Quarter Sessions, 1818.
Single; Furrier; Height: 160 cm.
Dark sallow complexion, black hair, dark eyes.
The Morely arrived in New South Wales on 18 November 1818 and on 24 November Solomons was forwarded to Liverpool for assignment on the Lady Nelson. On 6 November 1823 the Sydney Gazette announced that Abraham Solomons had absconded from service and, consequently, on 25 November 1823 Solomons was transported to Port Macquarie by the Lady Nelson. Abraham Solomons was listed as a government servant at Port Macquarie in 1825. He received a certificate of freedom on 10 May 1825. He was the purchaser of land in the District of Illawarra in 1837.
HO 10/20; Ship Indent 4/4006, p. 153; Land Correspondence 2/7982 (1837); CF 032/3656.
SOLOMONS, Eliza (Elizabeth)
b. London, 1816
Layton, 1833; Free.
Single; Servant.
Elizabeth Solomons was a 17-year-old bounty migrant from London, who arrived in Port Jackson on 17 December 1833. She appeared on the list of women employed from the lumber yard (where the new arrivals were allowed to gather in order to find a suitable employer). She was given a job by a Mr Vaiben Solomon (q.v.) of Hunter Street at the rate of six shillings a week.
Layton Indent 4/5205; List of Women Employed, 4/4325, p. 1.
SOLOMONS, Frederick
b. 1769
Surprize (1), 1790; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1788.
Single.
Frederick Solomons was sentenced for the theft of seven glazed framed prints valued at eight shillings. Together with two other men, Solomons stole the pictures from the shop window. They were chased through the streets. The other two men escaped and Solomons was found with the prints in his apron pockets. He claimed he had been asked to carry them, pleading ‘I am as innocent as a child unborn’. On 2 April 1788, despite the evidence of three character witnesses, he was sentenced to seven years transportation.
Solomons came to Australia with the Second Fleet. In September 1791, a year after he had arrived, Solomons was sent to Norfolk Island. On 31 March 1793 he was given twenty-five lashes for ‘answering to the name of another person on a muster at night’. On 6 November 1795 he sailed for Sydney on the Supply, but was back on Norfolk Island by the 1801 Muster. He does not appear in later colonial records.
Michael Flynn, The Second Fleet, p. 544; OBSP, 1787–88, case 296, p. 419; Norfolk Island Victualling Book, ML, A1958, p. 32a.
SOLOMONS, Hanna (Samuels)
Brothers, 1824; Convict.
Hannah Solomons married James Box at the Church of England, Parramatta, in 1833. This entry could well be a clerical error. A Hannah Samuels arrived as a convict on the Brothers in 1824 and was an assigned convict servant in Sydney.
SOLOMONS, Hannah
b. London, 1809
Princess Royal (2), 1829; Convict; Sentenced to 14 years, Old Bailey, 1828.
Single; Prostitute.
Hannah Solomons, a prostitute, robbed a client of £2 8s 6d. She was the sister of John Solomons (q.v.). Her client James Winter testified ‘I am a lighterman. On Saturday, the 6th of September, I received three half crowns and two sovereigns. I had half a crown and one shilling besides. I went to a public houe, had a beefsteak, a pint of beer and a glass of gin with a fellow servant. I then came out and met (Hannah) Solomons who asked me to give her some gin, which I did. I was sober. I went to her lodgings in Bell Yard and gave her three shillings and six pence to get some supper. I sat in a chair and went to sleep. I had been up four nights and was very tired. I was awoke by Charles Banks rumbling me over. I jumped up and said “You have robbed me”. He went around the bed and gave something to Solomons who was sitting up in the bed. I went to seize him. He seized hold of me and got me down the siars, ill used me and turned me out. I called “Watch”. Two watchmen went up the stairs into the same room with me. The prisoners were the both in bed. We could find nothing in the room. We took them to the watch-house’. Then returned and found my money in a silk handkerchief between the sacking and mattress.‘Hannah Solomons, aged twenty, was sentenced to transportation for fourteen years on 11 September 1828. Her accomplice was sentenced to six months in gaol.’
Hannah Solomons worked as an assigned servant in the District of Windsor and received a ticket of leave in 1832. She received permission to marry in 1837. The marriage was performed by the Rev. H. H. Bolard at St John's, Parramatta, and the groom was Charles Smith, aged twenty-five, who held a ticket of leave and had arrived on the Surrey (5). Hannah received her certificate of freedom on 2 May 1843.
OBSP 11 September 1828 case 1920. Principal Superintendent of Convicts, Ticket of Leave Butts, 15 November to 31 December 1832, 4/4086, 32/1165; Principal superintendent of Convicts, Registers of Exemption from Government Labour, 15 November 1832, 4/4062, 32/1165; Permission to Marry Book 4/4513, p. 16; CF 4/4382, 43/0694.
SOLOMONS, Isaac (SULLIVAN)
b. London, 1808
Florentia (1), 1828; Convict; Sentenced to 14 years, Old Bailey, 1827.
Single; Labourer; Height: 170 cm.
Isaac Solomons was a 19-year-old professional pickpocket who lived near Petticoat Lane and was arrested for stealing a watch. When he was caught he offered to refund its cost at five shillings a week. He defended himself by saying: ‘I am no relation to Ikey Solomon’ (Isaac Solomon, q.v.), ‘and trust my name will not prejudice me’. He had a ruddy complexion, brown hair, hazel eyes and a slightly pock-pitted face. He could read. He had two previous convictions. Solomons was sentenced to transportation on 11 June 1827.
The Florentia arrived in Sydney on 3 January 1828 and Solomons was assigned to work for Mr John MacDonald in Parramatta. He was listed as a Jew in the 1828 Census. He was said to be aged twenty-two, and worked as a government servant on Road Gang no. 14 at Kissing Point. He was apprehended after absconding from Road Gang no. 30 on 21 April 1830 and was placed on the treadmill for three days. Later in the same year he absconded from Iron Gang no. 6, and was apprehended on 13 January 1831. Solomons worked as an assigned servant to Hugh O'Donnell in Parramatta from 1832 to 1840. On 4 May 1836 Isaac Solomons, alias Isaac Sullivan, asked for a new assignment. He wrote that he had ‘served faithfully’ and ‘for nearly seven years I have been employed on the road in the District of Argyle and, at present employed thereon. Your Petitioner hereby prays that Your Excellency will be graciously pleased to order his being assigned to some master whereby he may derive a Knowledge of Agricultural and farming business which, at present is denied him’.
Sadly, Solomons of Road Party no. 4 was committed for trial on 26 July 1836 at the Hyde Park Barracks for being a ‘runaway’ and was remanded. However, according to the 1837 General Return of Convicts in New South Wales, he was still incarcerated in the ‘House of Correction’. On 17 April 1839 he was admitted to the Parramatta Gaol for an unspecified offence and put on the treadmill as a punishment. A ticket of leave was issued in 1840 for the district of Liverpool. This was altered for Campbelltown on 20 April 1840 and on 5 December 1840 was changed for Maitland. He received a conditional pardon in 1841 and a certificate of freedom on 10 March 1842.
OBSP, 1826–27, case 1464, p. 562; Ship Indent 4/4013, p. 23; TL Register 4/4139–40/873; Bench of Magistrates, Hyde Park Barracks, X707; Parramatta Gaol Book 4/6533, no. 741; Sydney Gazette, 13 January 1831; CS 36/4146, 4/2309; Central Criminal Court 4/6448, for 12 November 1836; CP 41/1000; HO 10/52.
SOLOMONS, John (SOLOMON)
b. London, 1791
Mariner (1), 1816; Convict; Sentenced to 14 years, Old Bailey, 1815.
Single; Butcher; Height: 157 cm; 12 children.
Fair ruddy complexion, ruddy, pock-pitted. Brown hair, hazel eyes. John Solomons was tried on 6 December 1815. He had been tricked into selling twenty-four counterfeit replicas of 3-shilling pieces to an agent of the Bank of England. The transaction took place at Coventry Cross, Petticoat Lane. The City Constable, who made the arrest, said to the court: ‘I held him tight as if it was highway robbery. I told him it was nearly as serious an affair. He said he did not care; they would not hang him; they could only transport him’.
John Solomons arrived in New South Wales on 11 October 1816. The 1828 Census gives us some information about John Solomons, who was most certainly Jewish but who appears to have abandoned his faith and become a ‘Protestant’. He married Margaret H. Duncan at St Philip's Church on 22 February 1819. John ‘Solomon’ was listed as a ‘dealer’ living in Pitt Street, Sydney, with five children: George (aged nine), Hannah (aged seven), Mary Ann (aged five), Caroline (aged two and a half), and Joan (aged three months).
A ticket of leave was issued to him on 28 October 1817 for Sydney. John Solomons announced that he had ‘removed to 4 King Street at the end of 1820’. On 12 May 1821 his household effects were put up for sale and he was called upon to show cause why he was not to be declared insolvent.
On 17 December 1827 the merchant Walter Jacob Levi (q.v.) appeared at the Supreme Court in Sydney on behalf of John Solomons: ‘Last market day on Thursday morn John Solomon at a quarter past 5 came into the [Sydney] market to find his table gone. Mr Whitfield took hold of Solomon, took him by the collar and tore his jacket. Solomons had been a stall holder at the market for eight years. Whitfield did beat, bruise and wound and ill treat Solomon’.
A certificate of freedom was issued on 7 December 1829.
4/4425; Bigge Appendix, CO 201/118; TL 143/1223; CF 4/4299, 7 December 1829, 29/1048; Sydney Gazette, 17 December 1829; Commercial Journal and Advertiser, 23 September 1841; CF 4/4300.
The son of Aaron Solomons (q.v.) and Rachel (née Davis), and the brother of Saul Solomons (q.v.), Nathaniel Solomons had married Eva Sarah Van der Pohl (Isaacs) in Houndsditch, London, in 1843. Nathaniel and Eva arrived in Launceston with their two children, Rachel (born 1846) and Leah (1847), both of whom were born in London. Their next three children, Phoebe (1848), Rebecca (1849), and Isaac Henry (1850), were born in Launceston.
Nathan Solomons owned a drapery store in Launceston and on 6 October 1849 charged his assigned convict Abraham Cohen (alias Thomas Phillips) (q.v.) with stealing four pairs of trousers. Cohen was found ‘not guilty’.
The family moved to Melbourne, where they had seven daughters: Katherine (Katie) (born 1855), Sarah (1857), Eva (1859), Julia (1861), Hannah (1864), Rebecca (1865), and Amelia (born in Ballarat, 2 February 1868).
Nathaniel died on 14 September 1900 at ‘Rokeby’, Herbert Street, Middle Park, and was buried at the Melbourne General Cemetery. His wife died at the Melbourne suburb of Albert Park on 28 July 1901.
SOLOMONS, Phoebe
1826–1847
Free.
Single.
Phoebe Solomons, the 16-year-old daughter of Aaron Solomons (q.v.), married 29-year-old Bertram Nathan (q.v.) in Launceston on 17 June 1846. She died in Launceston on 4 January 1847.
SOLOMONS, Rachael
b. 1826
Free.
Single.
Rachael Solomons (aged nineteen) married John Aaron in Launceston on 22 August 1845.
SOLOMONS, Samuel
b. London, d. 1853
Surprize (1), 1791; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1788.
1 child.
Samuel Solomons was tried on 10 December 1788. He had stolen 36 pounds weight of lead. A watchman found him behind the gate of the Aldgate Workhouse. He said: ‘You old bloody bugger you won't find your own way out of here’, and then took a short stick from under his coat. The prisoner ran out of Meeting House Yard and hid himself behind a ‘necessary’ (lavatory).
The convict transport ship Surprize lost thirty-eight of its prisoners on the way out to New South Wales and only 121 convicts landed alive. Samuel Solomons' sentence expired in 1795. He settled at the Hawkesbury and his name appeared on an 1806 petition from the inhabitants of the Hawkesbury District disputing John Macarthur's claim to speak on their behalf. The 1806 New South Wales Muster recorded that he was free by servitude and that he lived at Richmond Hill ‘as a tenant with 49 acres of land with 6 growing wheat, 6 growing maize and 1 barley’. He was free by servitude and not being fed from the government stores. Solomons was listed in the 1811 New South Wales Muster. He received his certificate of freedom on 1 January 1811.
In 1820 he was listed as a tenant of Jane Pool with seven acres of land in the region. He was living with Sarah Eglington. They had one male child. Samuel Solomons was listed in the 1828 Census as being free by servitude and ‘Protestant’. He was employed by Elizabeth Hill, Richmond. An absolute pardon was recommended in March 1839 and a conditional pardon was granted to him in August 1843. By 1841 Solomons and his ‘wife’ lived in Sydney at the corner of Liverpool Street and Kent Street. They were said to be ‘very aged’. When rain flooded their cellar and their home wall began to crumble, they asked the authorities to build a buttress to support their home. Their petition was refused.
Samuel Solomons died on 4 July 1853 and was buried by the synagogue in the Jewish section of the Devonshire Street Cemetery.
OBSP, 1788–89, case 54, p. 38; HO 10/1, no. 2; HO10/5 Muster of 1811; Pardons Register 4/4427, p. 524; Petition 4/2535.4, 42/5460.1; New South Wales Muster, 12 August 1806; Petition 41/5460.1, June 1841, in 4/2535.4; Hawkesbury settler, 1806, A751, pp. 174, 179; Absolute Pardon recommended, 27 March 1839, A1220, pp. 545, 547; ML A1293 pp. 147–54; Certificate of Emancipation 1811, 4/4427, p. 524/5.
SOLOMONS, Samuel
b. London, 1795–1853
Prince of Orange (1), 1821; Convict; Sentenced to life, London, 1819.
Single; Tailor; Height: 160.5 cm; 3 children.
Pale complexion, sandy brown hair, grey eyes. Solomons robbed the Rev. Dr Roderick McLeod of a watch and chain. Solomons was of ‘innocent appearance’ on a moonlit night at 11 p.m., and made so many apologies for bumping into the clergyman that it put him off guard. Solomons ran down Petticoat Lane with the booty and was caught. He was sentenced to death at the London Gaol Delivery on 26 May 1819, and this was later commuted to transportation for life.
The Prince of Orange arrived in Sydney on 12 February 1821 and Samuel Solomons was forwarded to Parramatta for assignment. Solomons, aged thirty-six, was listed in the 1828 Census, and in the List of Convicts in New South Wales of November 1828, as a Jew and as a dealer in Goulburn Street, Sydney, and the holder of a ticket of leave. The Colonial Secretary noted that he was ‘of Pitt St’ and could receive an assigned convict servant. He was married to Elizabeth (aged thirty, holding a conditional pardon) with children Lewis aged five and Benjamin aged three. A ticket of leave was issued to him on 26 September 1828, a conditional pardon in 1834, and an absolute pardon, recommended on 1 March 1839 (no. 40), was granted on 14 May 1840.
Samuel Solomons moved to Sydney and was ‘selling frocks and trousers etc at Polack's buildings opposite the Police Office’ (according to the Sydney Times, 17 September 1836). Solomons had a business as general dealer at 18 York Street. On 6 July 1837 he advertised a furniture auction sale at 6 Polack's Building and then, through 1838 to 1842, he advertised auctions ‘every Friday at 1 pm at the Sydney Cattle Market’. In September 1839 he was able to make a £15 donation to the appeal for the building of the new Sydney Synagogue. Samuel Solomons was declared insolvent in the crash of 1843 (Sydney Morning Herald, 28 August 1843), with debts of £397, outstanding debts of £123, and a deficiency of £263 12s.
He was active in the affairs of the Jewish community but resigned from the Sydney Synagogue Committee on 7 February 1840 due to ‘the multiplicity of my affairs’. It is probable that his non-Jewish wife was proving an embarrassment. In 1839 Mr Samuel Solomons had given £5 to the York Street Synagogue on his own behalf and £5 for each of his male children, Master Lewis Solomons, Master Benjamin Solomons and Master William Solomons. Samuel Solomons was listed in the 1834 General Post Office Directory as living at the corner of Hunter and Castlereagh streets, Sydney.
OBSP, 1818–19, case 826, p. 315; HO 11/3; CS 4/4570, p. 33; TL Register 4/4061, dated 26 September 1828, 28/396; CP Register 4/4432-224, on 20 August 1835; Register of Exemptions 4/4062, p. 918; Governors' Despatches, ML, A1271, p. 222; Governors' Despatches, ML, A1220, p. 547, dated 1 March 1839; HO 10/52, AP 40.
SOLOMONS, Saul
b. London
Adelaide, 1834; Free.
Single; Clerk.
Saul Solomons came out as a free settler on the Adelaide, arriving in Sydney on 5 September 1834. James Simmons (q.v.) had chartered the entire ship and Saul Solomons was its only passenger and was probably employed by Simmons as his clerk.
Saul Solomons, ‘dealer’, of Parramatta, was declared insolvent on 10 March 1843. In 1849 Saul Solomons married Catherine Keegan at Scots Church in Sydney.
Indent 4/5207; Sydney Morning Herald, 10 March 1843.
SOLOMONS, Saul (SOLOMON)
b. London, 1822–1891
1840; Free.
Single; Draper; 6 children.
Saul Solomons came free to Van Diemen's Land. The 1842 Census shows that the family lived in a wooden house in Charles Street, Launceston, that was owned by Joshua Lyons (q.v.). Solomon gave two shillings and sixpence to a charitable appeal for the family of a district constable who had been shot by bushrangers on 9 June 1843. Saul signed the Launceston Synagogue petition of 20 May 1843 and father (Aaron Solomons, q.v.) and son formed a partnership ‘A. & S. Solomons’. In 1846 they made the bad mistake of taking over the Launceston Emporium from David Benjamin (q.v.), who had decided to move to Melbourne. As the Emporium quickly sank into debt, Saul's own bakery business burnt down. As soon as it was possible Saul moved to South Australia with his family on the Halcyon, arriving on 28 February 1849.
On 20 November 1844 Solomons had married Miriam Barnett (q.v.), ‘a shopkeeper’ (born 1822 in London). It was Launceston's fifth Jewish wedding and Morris Whyte (Whyle, q.v.) officiated. Three of their six children were born in Launceston and three in Adelaide. They were Rachel Miriam (born 7 October 1845), Amelia (3 October 1846), Phoebe (11 March 1848), Baron Isaacar (8 May 1849), Henry Aaron (20 March 1851), and Matilda (Tillie) (18 June 1853). All six children lived out their lives in Adelaide and were eventually buried in Adelaide's West Terrace Jewish Cemetery. At the High Holydays in 1850 Saul Solomons was listed as a member of the committee of the Adelaide Hebrew Congregation.
Saul Solomons died in Adelaide on 8 March 1891. He had been a ‘draper of Burra Burra House’ for thirty-seven years. Miriam Solomons died on 5 August 1917, at the age of ninety-four.
CO 280/157; Pritchard Index.
SOLOMONS, Simon (SAULDS)
Salamander, 1790; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Old Bailey, 1789.
Single; Labourer.
According to the account of the trial a ‘genteel’ accomplice tricked a young servant who was carrying a box to leave his post and hail a coach. The servant returned only just in time to catch Simon Solomons who was running towards Aldgate with the deal box in which there was 70 shillings worth of soap. Solomons was sentenced on 9 September 1789.
Simon Solomons was transported with the Third Fleet on the Salamander, reaching Port Jackson on 1 August 1790. Solomons went on to Norfolk Island on the same ship. He left the island on 30 March 1793, having remained dependent on the government stores throughout the three years. From 1791 to 1796 he was listed as the owner of thirty acres of land at Parramatta. He was still in Sydney in August 1806 but did not appear in the 1811 Muster, and had probably returned to England.
OBSP, 1788–89, case 691, p. 818; Convict no. 365, in Norfolk Island Victualling Book, A1958, p. 33a; Magistrates Book 1/297, 1798; Registrar, General Dept. Files, series 1, p. 138; New South Wales Muster, 12 August 1806.
Dark sallow complexion, dark brown hair, hazel eyes. Solomon Solomons could neither read nor write English. He was sentenced on 20 April 1814 for stealing a watch and chain from a mathematical instrument maker. John Ripley gave evidence: ‘I was walking down the Minories with a friend; we were arm in arm together; the prisoner stepped on the pavement, came round to my right hand and snatched my watch chain’. Mr James Grantham testified: ‘We were walking down the Minories, Mr Ripley had hold of my arm, he let go and stumbled; the Jew ran off; I followed him and took him in custody; I never lost sight of him’. Solomons said: ‘I was going in a great hurry to go to my aunt to let her know my mother was brought to bed; a gentleman called after me and took me in custody. I know nothing of it, no more than a new born infant’. He was sentenced at the London Gaol Delivery on 20 April 1814.
The Marquis of Wellington arrived in Sydney on 27 January 1815 and on 2 February Solomons was sent to Windsor for assignment. On 7 August 1816 Solomon Solomons was sent by the magistrate Rev. Cartwright to serve for three years at the penal settlement in Newcastle after he had ‘continually’ run away from the penal settlement. Between 1816 and 1820 Solomons was listed as an assigned convict servant to Joseph Thomas.
Solomons married Elizabeth Jones (who was a free settler) on 2 July 1821 at St Philip's in Sydney and one of his witnesses at the marriage, conducted by the Rev. William Cowper, was Abraham Levy (q.v.) and Maria Gardner. (The two chosen witnesses would be married to each other in mid 1824). By 1822 Solomons was working as a dealer in Sydney.
Solomon Solomons, ‘a dealer’, was imprisoned by the Governor's Court on 13 April 1823 for a demand to pay £50 (plus costs) to Robert Howe, who was described as Solomons' executor and administrator. Solomons signed his name in Hebrew script, the letters of which were then crudely copied on the court document. Solomons' signature must have been the first Hebrew letters on any Australian legal document.
On 8 April 1826 Solomons was reported and reprimanded for buying a bottle of gin from an unlicensed vendor. Worse was to come. The Sydney Gazette and the (Sydney) Monitor reported on 15 August 1826 that Solomon Solomons, holding a ticket of leave, had been apprehended in a ‘House of Ill Fame’ at 3 a.m., sitting around a card table and gambling. (The Monitor placed its report on its front page.) Ten days later his ticket of leave was cancelled.
John Macarthur wrote of Solomons that he was a ‘Jew publican—lately deprived of his licence for keeping a disorderly house’. On 16 August 1826 Elizabeth Solomons petitioned the Colonial Secretary either to give her husband back his ticket of leave or to let him be assigned to her ‘to support his three young infants’. The Rev. Cowper attested: ‘This young woman is industrious, peaceable and sober and being moreover attentive to her three children, born in wedlock, is recommended’. Officialdom agreed with the plea: ‘In consequence of this woman's good character, I will allow her husband to remain with her out of Barracks. He must attend church regularly with the other men and be informed if found gambling again he will be placed back in prison’.
In the 1828 Census Solomon Solomons' ticket of leave had not been returned, and he was described as Jewish and working in government service. However, in the List of Convicts in New South Wales in November 1828, he appeared as a dealer in Pitt Street. He lived with his wife Elizabeth, born in the colony, aged twenty-two. They had six children, all born in the colony: George (born 24 March 1822), William (13 October 1823), who died after falling into a well in 1825, John (6 February 1826), Michael (23 March 1828 to 1899), Solomon (3 April 1830), and William (1834–1882).
Family tradition says that Solomon died in ‘a pub brawl’ in 1834. Elizabeth subsequently married Lewis Barnett (q.v.).
OBSP, 20 April 1814; Ship Indent 4/4005; Sent to Newcastle 4/3495, 7 August 1816; CO 201/179, Letter to John Horton, 11 July 1826; Petitions from Wives of Convicts, 1826–27, 4/7084; TL Register 4/4060, TL 169/2303; Australian, 8 April 1826; Monitor, 25 August 1826; Sydney Gazette, 16 August 1826; Petition in CS 4/3504, p. 79; HO 10/33; family research by Jim Needs, Edgeworth, NSW, and Robin Guthrie, Sydney.
SOLOMONS, Solomon
b. London, 1796
Lady Castlereagh, 1818; Convict; Sentenced to life, Old Bailey, 1817.
Single; Butcher (‘very little’); Height: 159 cm.
Fair ruddy complexion, dark brown hair, hazel eyes. Solomon Solomons was one of a gang of four or five men who ‘hustled’ around a man in Bacon Street in Bethnal Green. Solomons was seen to be the actual thief and was caught in the skirmish that followed the theft of the victim's wallet. He was condemned to death at the London Gaol Delivery on 21 May 1817 and the sentence was later commuted to transportation for life.
Solomon Solomons arrived in Sydney on 30 May 1818, and was sent on to Van Diemen's Land, arriving on 11 June 1818. His police dossier began on 4 July, when he was found to be drunk and disorderly and was ordered to work for the government for fourteen days in his own time. During the remainder of 1818 he received fifty lashes for two charges of disobeying an overseer and for neglect of duty. On 2 October 1819 he was found guilty of stealing a soldier's shirt and was sentenced to a further fifty lashes. For ‘frequently losing government bullocks’, he received twenty lashes on 13 December 1820. Two years later, on 8 May 1822, Solomons was given fifty lashes and three months in the chain gang for ‘neglect of duty’, and on 7 July 1826 he was convicted for the theft of a pair of shoes and a piece of canvas and sent to Maria Island to serve the first part of a three-year sentence. After an attempt to escape from the island, Solomons was sent to Macquarie Harbour on the island's west coast and to the dreaded penal colony on Sarah Island. It was a miracle he survived the experience.
On 9 November 1827, for ‘neglect of duty’, he received a further twenty-five lashes, and on 10 November 1927, for ‘neglect of duty and refusing to work’ on the day after being whipped, an additional twenty-five lashes was decreed. At Macquarie Harbour, on 15 December 1827, he was found guilty of ‘wanton carelessness in letting a piece of wood fall upon a fellow prisoner’, for which he received twenty-five lashes. On 5 January 1828, for ‘neglect of duty and refusing to work’, he received twenty-five lashes, and on 15 March 1828 he received eighteen lashes for ‘neglect of duty’. On 26 March he was given eighteen lashes for ‘refusing to work under false pretences’. On 3 May he received twenty-five lashes for ‘neglect of duty’, on 19 June, thirty-six lashes for ‘stealing or having a stolen shirt in his possession’, on 29 August, for ‘refusing to work’, twenty–five lashes. On 28 February 1829, for ‘refusing to sit down in a Gang Boat going to the Small Island’, he was put in irons for fourteen days, and on 5 June 1832, for ‘neglect of duty’, he received twenty-five lashes. He was returned to Hobart Town and on 4 February 1835 was sent to work with the Public Works Department at New Norfolk because of the ‘filthiness in his ward’ in Hobart Town.
Solomon Solomons received a ticket of leave on 23 September 1836, a conditional pardon on 18 January 1839, an absolute pardon in November 1840, and a free pardon on 24 December 1844, for ‘Any Country Except Europe’. In recommending the pardon, the official report stated that ‘Eight years had passed since he was charged with misconduct’. Solomons married, and apparently joined the Hobart Hebrew Congregation in 1845, renting seat no. 66.
OBSP, 1816–17, case 804, p. 280; Ship Indent 4/4002, p. 40; CON 13/1, p. 195; CON 31/38; CON 13/1, p. 73; CON 23/3; Hobart Town Gazette, 28 October 1826; Hobart Town Courier, 23 September 1836, 18 January 1839, 24 November 1840.
SOLOMONS, Solomon (Saul)
b. Portsmouth, 1814
Hooghly (4), 1834; Convict; Sentenced to 7 years, Southwark, 1834.
Single; Clothes dealer; Height: 169 cm.
Sallow, freckled complexion, black hair, chestnut eyes. Solomon Solomons was convicted on the same day, and of the same crime, as Saul Solomon (q.v.), and transported on the same ship. They were both convicted for picking pockets.
According to the 1837 General Return of Convicts in New South Wales Solomon Solomons was assigned to Mr J. Collett of Bathurst. Solomons received a ticket of leave in 1839. Solomon Solomons was charged at the Bathurst Police Magistrates Court on 17 June 1840 with receiving stolen property, and was returned to ‘the service of the government’.
His ticket of leave was cancelled and he was briefly returned to government service. A certificate of freedom was issued on 8 April 1841. A second ticket of leave was issued in Sydney on 15 July 1842 and a conditional pardon was granted on 1 July 1843 (no. 224).
On 4 August 1843 Solomons was sentenced for theft (picking pockets) at the Sydney Quarter Sessions to ten years colonial servitude and was sent to Van Diemen's Land and to Port Arthur. A long series of breaches of discipline were recorded. On 5 July 1844 he was sentenced to four days in solitary confinement for ‘insolence’. Three further sentences in solitary confinement followed. He was found to have a ’ piece of yellow cloth in his possession’ which extended a previous sentence of hard labour in chains by fourteen days. On 16 January 1846 he was found to have tobacco in his possession which earned him three months hard labour in chains. He was placed on probation from 1 June 1846 but on 6 July he was caught smoking and received seven days solitary confinement. In May 1848 he was allowed to proceed from the penitentiary at Port Arthur to Launceston. An application for a ticket of leave was refused even though it was said that he had ‘saved the life of a child’. On 29 May 1849 he was caught ‘out after hours’ and sentenced to two months hard labour. A ticket of leave was issued 5 March 1850 on the condition that he would not go to Hobart Town. A conditional pardon was issued 3 February 1852 and a certificate of freedom 21 January 1856.
Hooghly Printed Indent, arrived 18 November 1834, p. 165; TL p. 508, of 1840 Governors' Despatches, ML, A1222; CS Out 4/3688, p. 130; Principal Superintendent of Convicts, TL Butts, 20 November 1838 to 1 February 1839, TL 39/44, 4/4125; CF 41/0453. (AOT) CON 35/1/2 p. 46.
SPENCER, Esther
b. London, 1775–1855
Indispensable, 1796; Convict; Sentenced to life, Old Bailey, 1794.
Married; Height: 163 cm; 13 children.
Dark complexion, dark hair, dark eyes. Jewess. Esther was convicted for stealing two silver pepper castors and three silver spoons, valued at £2 14s. She was seen entering the home of a tailor and was caught near Bethnal Green with the silver hidden in her apron pocket. Esther told the court: ‘It is the first offence I ever did in my life. I hope you will forgive me’. She was sentenced to death on 16 July 1794, and this was later commuted to transportation for life.
The death certificate of Esther's daughter Cecilia (who died in Melbourne in 1896) states that Esther's real, or maiden, name was Salamon—a distinguished name in Anglo-Jewish history. Esther had thirteen children and three husbands in New South Wales. The first two children, by John Fitz (who arrived on the Royal Admiral in 1792), were Susannah, born 23 July 1797, and Joseph, born 29 December 1799. (There is a record in the colony's list of Birth, Marriages and Deaths of a Susanna Watson who was born in Sydney on 28 December 1798 and who was said to be the daughter of Michael Watson and Esther Spencer). Nine of Esther's children were fathered by Thomas Stubbs (who arrived on the Albermarle, 1791). They were: Mary Ann (born 28 May 1801), Thomas (18 May 1802), Sophia (8 June 1803), Cecilia (17 March 1805), Elizabeth (15 March 1808), Ann (14 June 1809), George (22 April 1811), John Emery (5 July 1812), and Godfrey (9 October 1814).
Stubbs died in 1815 at the age of forty-one and Esther became involved with Joseph Bigge, who had come free to the colony in 1809. They had two children, Robert (born 1816) and Louise (1817).
In the 1828 Census Esther Bigge was listed as a Protestant. In 1831 Esther Bigge of 20 Phillip Street, Sydney, wrote to the Colonial Secretary asking for a grant of land. By that time she had twenty-one grandchildren. Her husband died in 1833. She became ‘the first to establish baths for the ladies of Sydney’ and, in 1838, wrote that ‘expense had not been spared to tender them deserving of the patronage hitherto bestowed on them’.
She died on 27 December 1855 at the age of seventy-nine and was buried in the Jewish section of Sydney's Devonshire Street Cemetery. The funeral was conducted by the Rev. Isaac Jacobs.
OBSP, 1794, case 447, no. 6; PRO 2730, p. 88; Australian, 11 October 1833; family information from June Walker (WA). Vic Death Registration Transcription Ref No 1896/14376. Biographic Database of Australia (information provided by Gary Luke).
SPYER, Joseph L.
d. 1841
Sydney Packet, 1833; Free.
Married.
Joseph Spyer arrived in Sydney on 3 February 1833 on the 83-ton Sydney Packet. His wife, Rosetta, was buried on 22 February 1841 in the Jewish section of the Lidcombe Cemetery and, on 1 March 1841, Joseph Spyer died and was ‘buried in one tomb’ with his wife.
Ship Indent 4/5204, arriving Port Jackson, 3 February 1833; Sydney Gazette, 5 February 1833.
SPYER, Lawrence Joseph (SPYERS)
1806–1881
Alexander Henry, 1828; Free.
Single; Merchant; 7 children.
The brother and partner of Stephen Spyer (q.v.), Lawrence Spyer arrived in Sydney on 28 May 1828. He was listed in the 1828 Census as a Jew, and a merchant in George Street with P. J. Cohen (q.v.), who came free to the colony. Spyer had arrived in New South Wales together with P.J. Cohen and the two young men formed a partnership. In April 1830, at the time of Passover, the first organised Jewish festival religious services in Australia were held at the premises of Cohen and Spyers. A year later the business had failed and on 31 March 1831 the partnership was declared to be insolvent.
Spyer went to Maitland to look after his brother's store. He married Julia de Metz on 30 December 1835. His brother Stephen married Rosetta de Metz. In mid-1837 the Spyer brothers were placed in prison for three months by Samuel Lyons (q.v.) for money they owed to him.
Spyer joined the synagogue in September 1840 when he moved to Sydney and in September stood for election to the committee of management. A child, Sophia, was born on 10 August 1840, and Rosetta was born on 10 September 1841. Isabella was born in 1846, and Angelina in 1849. In all, the Spyers had seven children, five daughters and two sons.
On December 1842 ‘L & S Spyer merchants of Queens Place Sydney’ asked the colonial administration for permission ‘to import Champagne shipped by Messrs Jonas Phillips and Co in Philadelphia’. The firm L & S Spyer became one of the largest Jewish import-export businesses in Sydney during the mid-1840s, selling everything from turpentine and linseed oil to soda water bottles. They became representatives of the British Colonial Bank in 1843. In the 1850s the firm was joined by Henry and Joseph Spyer under the name of L. S. Spyer & Co., merchants, with their office at Wynyard Square. Lawrence Joseph Spyer was one of the four trustees for the New South Wales grant of land for a Jewish school in Sydney in 1850.
Lawrence Spyer died at Toorak in 1881. Julia Spyer died in Melbourne in 1883, aged sixty-seven.
CS Letters Received 1842, Miscellaneous, S–Y, 42/9140, December 1842, in 4/2579.3; Australian, 9 April 1830; Sydney Gazette, 19 May 1828, 31 March 1831, 19 May 1832, 30 December 1835; Sydney Morning Herald, 21 February 1843, 9 November 1843, 3 January 1845; Government Grants for Schools, 8 April 1850, series 197, p. 407.
SPYER, Stephen
Australia, 1830; Free.
Single; Dealer; 2 children.
Stephen Spyer travelled to New South Wales on the Australia, arriving on 16 April 1830, with the family of Michael Phillips (q.v.). In the Sydney Gazette of 19 May 1832, it was reported that: ‘Mr Stephen Spyer of Maitland is about to leave the colony for a short period. Business will be conducted by Mr Michael Phillips of Sydney. His brother Mr Lawrence Spyer will look after his stores at Maitland’. Stephen Spyer returned to Sydney (cabin class) on the Sovereign on 26 May 1834, listed as a ‘Merchant’.
On 16 June 1837 the Sydney Gazette told how the Spyer brothers were brought before the Supreme Court and sentenced to gaol for non-payment of debt: ‘The claim was discharged after having been in gaol for three months under the benefit of the Insolvency Act. Mr Windeyer, counsel for Messrs Saul Lyons (q.v.) and others, opposed the discharge’. On 20 June 1837 a letter pointed out that it was Samuel Lyons (q.v.) and not Saul who opposed the release of the Spyer Brothers from gaol.
Stephen Spyer married Rosetta de Metz at the Sydney Synagogue on 8 January 1840. His brother Lawrence (q.v.) married Julia de Metz. On 18 July 1840 the Port Lincoln Hotel advertised in the South Australian Register that Mr Stephen Spyer had arrived from Sydney ‘with goods such as bottled porter, sherry, rum and claret’. A son, Lawrence, was born in Sydney in 1840. On 25 July 1840 Spyer advertised that he was selling several properties, including the Port Lincoln Hotel itself. Rosetta died eight days after having given birth, on 22 February 1841. The baby, Joseph, died on 1 March and was buried with his mother at the Devonshire Street Jewish Cemetery. The tombstones of Rosetta and her son were removed to Raphael's Ground in 1901.
Spyer was included on the voters' list of Sydney in 1842. He owned Ultimo House and was a seat holder at the York Street Synagogue in 1845. Spyer returned to England to live and agreed to collect money in London for the Sydney Synagogue in 1845. On 11 October 1853 Stephen Spyer spent £2178 buying land in Sydney.
Ship Indent 4/5201, and 4/5206; Sydney Gazette, 19 May 1832, 16 June 1837, 20 June 1837; Sydney Morning Herald, 15 September 1842; South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register, 18 July 1840, 15 August 1840; Land Correspondence 2/7975 (11 October 1853).
STEINBOURNE, Aaron Moses (STEENBHOM)
b. Warsaw, Poland, c. 1825–1903
Lady Kennaway (3), 1851; Convict; Sentenced to 15 years, Central Criminal Court, 1845.
Single; Labourer; Height: 158 cm; 11 children.
Dark complexion, dark brown hair, black eyebrows, hazel eyes. Jew. Could read and write. ‘Impediment in speech.’ Aaron Steinbourne was transported for housebreaking and stealing jewellery and clocks from a private house at Lewisham. Following his conviction he spent time on the Justitia hulk, where his behaviour was ‘bad’, and the Warrior, where he attempted to stab and strangle another prisoner. Apart from this lapse his behaviour was judged to be ‘good otherwise’!
Aaron Steinbourne arrived in Hobart Town on 28 May 1851 and was sent on to Norfolk Island. On 4 July 1851 he was admonished for ‘neglect of duty’. On 9 December 1851 he was put in prison for one month for three counts of ‘disobedience’ and given twenty-five lashes for throwing a stone at a fellow prisoner. A long list of penalties for idleness and disobedience culminated on 19 April 1852 when he was punished for ‘hunting and cutting up a duck’ with a sentence of four months imprisonment. Steinbourne was transferred to Van Diemen's Land at the end of July 1852 and sent immediately to Port Arthur. On 22 November he was found guilty of disobedience of orders, for which his existing sentence of hard labour was extended by one month. On 3 September 1853 he was found in an officer's quarters ‘under very suspicious circumstances’ and his sentence was extended by three months. On 30 September he was sentenced to seven days in solitary confinement for ‘insolence’. On 18 November he was found with suet and fat concealed among his rations. His existing sentence of hard labour was extended by four months. On 21 November he was sentenced to six months work in the stone quarry for having tea and sugar and fat concealed in his cell. Smoking a pipe ‘improperly’ brought six months solitary ‘treatment’. On 28 February 1855 he was sentenced to fourteen days in solitary confinement for ‘idleness and insolence’. He finally obtained his ticket of leave on 21 October 1856 and a conditional pardon on 26 January 1858. In Hobart on 2 December 1858 in the Supreme Court he was found not guilty of a charge of ‘attempting to commit sodomy’.
Aaron adopted the surname Steenbhom and married Rachel Symons on 16 November 1859 in the York Street synagogue. They opened a general goods store in Pitt Town and quickly fell into debt. During the next couple of years they travelled as dealers with a horse and cart in the districts of Berrima, Braidwood and Yass. In 1863 at Boorowa he was held up by the bushranger Ben Hall. After returning to Sydney Aaron's subsequent caeer as a shopkeeper in Darlinghurst was marked by one financial crisis after another.
Aaron and Rachel had eleven children. They were: Solomon Myer Aaron (1860–1927), Abraham Newyear (1862–1942), Rebecca Elizabeth (1865–1867), Sarah Esther (1867–1935), David Joseph (1870–1955), Ephraim Joshua (1872–1950), Menasseh Benjamin (1875–1953), Isaac Simon (1877–1878), Rebecca Leah (1878–1945), Jacob Emanuel (1881–1956), and Reuben Naphtali (1884–1963).
The sons were all apprenticed to various trades. Solomon was a shipping dealer based at Darling Harbour and served as hononorary auditor of the Montefiore Home and the Great Synagogue and secretary of the Grand Uniting Order of Oddfellows for twenty-five years. Abraham, Jacob and Menasseh were partners in one of the largest motor body building companies in New South Wales. In the mid 1920s Jacob succeeded in obtaining the old Darlinghurst Gaol for technical education. David was in Western Australia and officiated at the Kalgoorlie synagogue.
Aaron died in Sydney on 21 June 1903. Rachel died on 19 July 1919 at the age of seventy-seven. They are buried at Rookwood.
CON 33/102, no. 24245; CON 14/42; CON 18/52; family information supplied by Gary Luke, Sydney.
SULLIVAN, John
Free.
The Sydney Gazette reported on 17 March 1825 that: ‘John Sullivan, a Jew, free, was apprehended under a violent suspicion of having stolen a canvas bag containing 300 Spanish dollars, from the office of the Colonial Treasurer between the hours of 11 and 12 this day whilst licences were being issued to the publicans. The circumstances were very strong against the prisoner’. Sullivan was committed to trial on 10 March 1825, found guilty, and discharged from custody on 28 September 1828.
In September 1839 John Sullivan pledged £5 to the building appeal of the proposed York Street Synagogue in Sydney.