Major William Sandys Elrington (1780–1860) was a British military officer, veteran of the Peninsula War, and colonial settler of New South Wales, Australia.
Before and after his father's time at Plymouth, Elrington's family lived at Low Hill House, at White Ladies Aston, Worcestershire.
Elrington followed his family's tradition of employment and joined the army in 1795, taking a commission in a regiment raised for the West Indies.
[2][3] Elrington left Plymouth, in November 1826, and arrived in Sydney aboard Elizabeth, in April 1827, with his second son, Richard, and a much older woman, Mary Smith, who acted as their housekeeper.
Early settlers would remember Elrington as a tall, red-headed, blue-eyed man, of soldierly bearing, carrying a scar on his forehead from being slashed with a sabre.
In its early years, Mount Elrington was the location of an annual distribution of government blankets to the surviving Aboriginal people.
In 1829, William Tarlington (1804—1893), with three Aboriginal guides, starting at Braidwood, followed the rivers into the Bega Valley, where he found good land and later settled as a squatter at Cobargo.
[13][14][15][16] Unlike a number of other landholders in the Braidwood district, Elrington does not appear to have been a supporter or financial backer of The Wool Road, to Jervis Bay.
In fact, around the same time, in 1842, he seems to have been involved in raising subscription funding for a rival private road, from Bellalaba to the port of Broulee.
His home at Mount Elrington was described as, "a substantial ten-roomed verandah dwelling, with stone store, and kitchen, a garden of six acres, well stocked with the choicest fruit trees, and vegetables, stables, cart sheds, sheep shed, forge, men's huts, saw pits, &c."[12] In May 1828, Elrington was appointed as a magistrate, joining Captain John Coghill[5] and, slightly later, Captain Duncan Mackellar, as the local Police Magistrates.
In 1838, he would be joined, by a newly-appointed magistrate for the Braidwood district, another ex-military man and landowner, Lieutenant Colonel John Mackenzie of Nerriga.
When the liberal-minded Richard Bourke replaced Ralph Darling as Governor in late 1831, he was horrified at the severity and arbitrary application of punishments being given to convicts.
In August 1832, he had passed the Offenders Punishment and Summary Jurisdiction Act,[28] which for the first time both codified and limited the penalties that could be imposed on convicts.
[29] Local lore has it that two gum trees, on the Shoalhaven River near Mount Elrington, which were cut down in the 1920s, had been used as makeshift gallows, and hangings were carried out there.
She had been sentenced by Elrington to three months, in 1836, 'for improper conduct in her hired service', an offence under the draconian Masters and Servants Act (1828).
Instead of being allowed, as planned, to stay overnight at an inn at Sutton Forest, she had been made to share a hut with the men, where the rape occurred.
[38] Even at the time, these appalling outcomes were seen as consequences of Elrington's harsh sentencing of Martha, for running away from her employer, who she said had ill used her, and remaining at large for just two days.
She had run away, after her employer—Henry Clay Burnell (1806 - 1888), the first settler at Araluen in 1831—and his wife Sarah, née Gray) had forcibly cut off her hair, a punishment of humiliation inflicted upon female convicts for 'vile offences'.
[45] It is reported that at dinner time, Elrington sat at one end of the table and at the other, his son, Richard, each with a loaded pistol, and that no convict servant was allowed to walk behind either of them.
One convict of African descent, named Moses, was said to have managed to stay at large for several weeks, by living on raw potatoes, turnips, and corn stolen from the estate's fields at night.
Found living, in a cavity in the river bank, only a quarter of a mile from the estate, gaunt and famished, Moses returned willingly, such was his condition.
In February 1836, charged with attempted murder, Hare was found guilty, by a jury, of the lesser offence of assault with intent to do some grievous bodily harm.
Mary's brothers Pat and Tom Connell also became bushrangers and, with their nephews and brother-in-law, part of what was a criminal extended family.
[43] It was the outrages of the Clarke gang that, at least in part, motivated Henry Parkes to introduce state-funded public schools to the Braidwood district, as "the means of instructing the young so they shall form an honest and intelligent generation".
His father, Thomas Farrell (1811—1901), was an ex-convict carpenter at Mount Elrington, when he married Mary Connell's younger sister, Ellen (c.1824—1902), in 1841.
It is probable that Elizabeth was either a daughter or other relative of Clement Caines, owner of a sugar plantation worked by enslaved people, on what was then known as St Christopher Island in the West Indies.
The couple eloped, marrying at Campbelltown, in 1838, and living for a time in Sydney, where Richard worked as a tutor and Louisa as a governess.
[11] After weathering the economic depression of the early 1840, which ruined many of his fellow settler landowners, he sold Mount Elrington to Charles Nicholson in 1845.
In 1840, he bought 640 acres of land—at a lower cost, as a result of his recent military service—far from Mount Elrington, near Maitland, in the Hunter Valley.
She also admitted that she deviated from the historical narrative in the character of 'Lieutenant Sandys', the elder son, and there are some differences from the sequence of actual events.