The veterans of Veterans Flat
The soldier settlement schemes of the First and Second World Wars had a precursor in Maitland which predated the First World War by nearly a century. Veterans Flat, along and under the Long Bridge, is the remnant of an 1820s attempt to settle veterans of the Napoleonic Wars on small farms. All the soldier settlement schemes were supposed to provide veterans with the means to health, wealth and happiness, but they were all disasters.
The design of the scheme
Maitland’s first scheme began in 1823 when Britain ordered the Governor (Sir Thomas Brisbane) to make available to members of the NSW Royal Veterans and Staff Corps 100 acres of good land along with a house, implements and even some cattle. The men who enlisted in the Royal Veteran Companies were expected to oversee convicts and maintain some civil order, thereby freeing the regular soldiers of these ‘belittling’ tasks. Most of the men were born in the 1790s, and had served in the Peninsular War or at Waterloo. Ideally they would be of good character, with no serious body infirmity and less than 50 years old. But they rapidly gained a reputation as lazy, disobedient and incapable of controlling the convicts they were allocated. One suspects the granting of their allotments was proceeded with post haste to get them off the government payroll.
The holdings at Veterans Flat. Note that Regent St is connected to what is now Cessnock Rd.
cartography: Lawrence Henderson
Details of lots and recipients at Veterans Flat (see map for locations)
In the initial offer in 1823, only one man took up a block in Maitland. Luke Ralph was given 100 acres on the eastern side of Telarah Lagoon to today’s Regent Street, from Campbells Hill down to Fishery (or Swamp) Creek (Lot 8 on the map). By 1831 Ralph was dead and the property reverted to Frederick Augustus Hely, the Superintendent of Convicts. George Kay may also have been offered a lot but he died in 1825 and his son was offered one in 1829 as compensation.
Most offers were made in 1829, and the lots were usually 40 acres. The Governor (by this time Ralph Darling), having learnt a few lessons, gave some of the veterans a back-up job. Eight Veterans who received grants, two in Wollombi and six along Veteran’s Flat, were given positions as Special Constables in Maitland. Other lots were offered to suppliant free settlers. Lot 10, for example, was offered to John Thurlow, the son of an English clergyman who arrived in the colony in 1824. He received other land grants in the colony and relinquished this one to Henry Incledon Pilcher. One suspects that this was an inducement for Pilcher, a solicitor, to take on John and his brother William as articled clerks. Both ended up as prominent lawyers in the Colony.
What happened to the scheme?
Today it is almost impossible to determine how many other blocks ended up in the hands of genuine veterans. The commonly quoted number is 17 but a detailed examination of the published histories of the lots indicates at least 20, with others going to the children of veterans.
The fate of these farmers was determined very quickly. Lots were either not taken up or were on-sold rapidly. The grants were too small and the land was described by one writer as having some patches of good big timber (but not with valuable timber like cedar) with much swampy land. Another described it in 1832 as “sludge (as we call it in Leicestershire)”.. It was all drained by small creeks which flowed to the Hunter River or Fishery Creek. These drains were quickly blocked because the backflow, whenever the river or creeks had a ‘fresh’, inundated the area. Consequently, any water from rain or backflow lingered indefinitely and ruined any crops that had been planted.
The owners also had to clear and make their land habitable swiftly in order to gain further government support (an extra cow for example). These military men had no experience of farming and they were given almost no support (a tent and six months’ rations at the most). No wonder they sold. By 1830 the Governor’s Secretary was writing:
HIS EXCELLENCY has directed it to be notified, that the Land, Dwellings, and Implements of Husbandry, … are not alienable under any Pretence whatever, but will be forfeited, and the Land immediately resumed, should the same be attempted to be disposed of within seven Years.
Some cases
Economic circumstances also created havoc amongst those who at least tried to make a go of the farms. John Hannan (Lot 6), for example, arrived in 1826 having served eleven years in the army and fighting at Waterloo. He fought alongside William Hall who was granted Lot 4 through which flowed a creek named in his honour, the cause of many a backflow into Veterans Flat. Halls Creek roughly paralleled today’s Mount Pleasant St.
Hannan was lucky in that The Falls (the ford across the Hunter) was close to his property and he developed roads (including Hannan St) to access it through his property and charged agistment for delayed crossings. The depression of the early 1840s, however, hit him and many others hard and in November 1843 the Sheriff's Bailiff ordered a sale of his farm machinery, his crop of wheat and household furniture. Unfortunately this did not satisfy the debt and in 1848, the premises and land were also sold.
The plight of the men and their families is best illustrated by John Robinson, a private in the Veterans with a de facto wife and a child (Lot 27). Within six months he applied to Walter Rotton, a local auctioneer, for aid until he could harvest his first crop. This crop was lost in a ‘fresh’ and the next to drought. He gave up and Rotton purchased it illegally for debts owed. Rotton was later told that he would have to tender for purchase of the ‘abandoned’ land. He did this but was gazumped by one of the rapacious land grabbers of the time, HC Sempill.
Rotton claimed, in 1835, that more than half the men had given up but it was probably more than that. The ‘abandoned’ land ended up in the hands of other hovering vultures, HI Pilcher and Edward Sparkes especially. Pilcher ended up with three lots (Lots 1, 10 and 13).
Those who survived did so by taking up other trades. Four, for example, became innkeepers: the most famous, a ‘Hero of Waterloo’, was John Wilkinson (Lot 24). Wilkinson built the Waterloo Inn on the corner of High and Abbott streets.
References
‘Abstract of sales by auction’, Maitland Mercury, 12 July, 1848.
Belcher, Michael, ‘Our past: region’s veterans settlement scheme began in 1823’, Maitland Mercury, 30 June 2021.
