Sergeant Sneyd

When the archive stripped the Sneyds of their invented descent from Keele Hall, it was braced to lose something. It gained this instead: not a squire but a sergeant of Mounted Police, and a life that can be traced through the birthplaces of his own children. How the Keele descent was broken →

The 4th (King's Own)

Born at Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, on 15 March 1810 and christened there on 28 April 1811, the son of Samuel Sneyd, a grocer of Hanley, and Elizabeth Margaret Oliver. In 1832 he came to New South Wales with the 4th (King's Own) Regiment of Foot — one of the regiments doing convict-guard duty in the colony, the same work that had brought Major George Pitt D'Arcy out six years earlier. The other soldier in this family →

On 13 February 1837 he married Catherine Margaret Mulcahy at Camden. Their first child, William Hartley Sneyd — this archive's direct ancestor — was born at Kempsey the following year.

Private 1463, 80th Foot, Mounted Police Attached

He is in the muster, and it complicates the obituary in an interesting way.

Checked and excluded. Several Samuel Sneyd entries in the Chelsea pension returns (WO 22) belong to a different man — 54th Foot, pension paid at Dublin. They are not him, and are recorded here so that nobody attaches them later. Still wanted: the muster book WO 12/8483 itself, and any discharge papers. Queued →

The taking of Chubb, Knowles and Rees

On 29 October 1839 two runaway convicts, Thomas Chubb and Frederick Knowles, together with a third man named Rees, robbed the house of a settler named Brown near the Vale of Clwydd, in the mountains west of Sydney.

The next day Brown rode for the police. What happened then was printed in Sydney nine days later.

Mr. Brown proceeded to the mounted police station at Bowen's Hollow, when Serjeant Sneyd and a private trooper proceeded in quest of the bushrangers … Sneyd perceived them first; they were mounted and well armed; having crept through the bush until he came quite close to them, he issued from the bush and charged them. One of the bushrangers fired at the trooper but missed him … the serjeant fired after them and shot one of them dead, and after a little difficulty took the other two into custody.

The Monitor's correspondent adds the detail the family story lost: the men had raided Mr Brown's mill on the Mudgee road, robbed the household and held the women at gunpoint; and when they were taken they had the stolen property on them and eight firearms. The paper commends Sneyd's bravery, and then turns to a complaint about lenient sentencing — which is how a piece of this family's history came to be printed at all.

Great praise is due to Serjeant Sneyd, who showed a great deal of courage in the taking of them.

Chubb and Knowles were tried at the Supreme Court of New South Wales on 1 February 1840 and convicted — reported as R. v. Chubb [1840] NSWSupC 4. The third man, Rees, was already dead.

Two later scholarly compilations of 1839–40 New South Wales court and press records give a fuller version of the pursuit: that Brown's neighbour Walker joined them, and with him two Aboriginal trackers — whose names none of the accounts record — who followed the bushrangers all day before the party came up with them near the head of Wallowa Creek.

The 1839 report and the later compilations differ on one point of choreography: the Monitor has Sneyd creeping up and charging mounted, armed men, while the secondary accounts have the party tracking all day and finding them encamped at night. Both mention the Aboriginal trackers. The newspaper is four days after the event and is preferred; the difference is recorded rather than smoothed away.

The family tree's own note gives the place as "Piper's Flat, about 25 miles from Bathurst" and the third man as "Reis". Piper's Flat is in the same country, near Wallerawang; the spelling of the dead man's name varies between Rees and Reis across accounts. Neither difference is material, and both are recorded here rather than quietly harmonised.

Where the children were born

He left no service file this archive has yet seen. But a policeman's postings can be read directly off the birthplaces of his children, and one of them is named for the town he was stationed in:

John Braidwood Sneyd, born at Braidwood in 1842, is the clearest of them — a child given the name of the place his father was posted. And Samuel Hartley Hanley Stafford Sneyd, born 1851, carries the family's Staffordshire origins in his own name: Hanley, the town, and Stafford, the county.

And his obituary supplies the rest of the career, which turns out to be a great deal more than "the Queensland police".

Governor of Brisbane Gaol

Mr. Sneyd came to Australia in 1832 with the "4th of Kings" regiment. In the early days of New South Wales he was selected as one of the picked men from the regiment to suppress bushranging in that colony. While in the Mounted Police he rose to the position of sergeant-major of the Goulburn Division. He came to Moreton Bay as chief constable in 1849, and retired from that position in 1859, when he was promoted to fill the position of Governor of the gaol. Out of the six constables then in Brisbane two are now alive, namely, Mr. Samuel Wright and Mr. James Frederick.

He was chief constable at Moreton Bay from 1849 — effectively the head of policing in Brisbane in the decade before Queensland separated from New South Wales — and then Governor of Brisbane Gaol from 1859. He retired to "a snug little farm" at Enoggera, drawing a New South Wales pension and a Queensland compensation payment.

He died there on the evening of Saturday 4 July 1885, aged 75. He had come into town on the Friday "in the best of spirits". He went to bed about ten, complained of feeling unwell ten minutes later, and was dead within fifteen minutes, before a doctor could reach him. Dr Hill's post-mortem gave the cause as heart disease. The obituary calls him "a fine specimen of a bluff but kindly-hearted Englishman".

The gaol he ran

Two years into the job, The Courier sent a writer through the Brisbane Gaol and printed a long account of it. He was shown round by the governor:

by the kindness of Mr. Sneyd, the governor, we were made acquainted with the internal economy … the Brisbane Gaol was as well managed as it could be under the circumstances and the money voted for it … there is no overcrowding, the consequences of which are overcome only by the very best management on the part of the governor and those in authority.

The writer notes that the prisoners' bread was "really good white, fresh, and wholesome", and that men leaving the gaol could take up employment — an unusually approving piece about a colonial prison, and the closest thing the archive has to a description of his working life.

And the gaol became a family trade. His son Joseph Sneyd was chief warder at the Brisbane Gaol for thirty years — recorded in the 1911 obituaries of Joseph's own son, published at Ipswich and Brisbane. Father governor, son chief warder, across half a century of the same building.

Two discrepancies, recorded. The obituary places his death at Enoggera; the family tree says Westwood Lodge, Alderley — adjoining suburbs, and both may be right of the same holding. And it says his father died "at the advanced age of 84", which for a death in 1855 gives a birth about 1771 — pulling against the Madeley baptism of 1781 and towards the tree's unsourced 1769. That one is genuinely open. The Madeley line →

Two soldiers, one family

It is worth noticing what this archive is actually made of. Cristina's great-great-great-grandfather on one side was Major George Pitt D'Arcy of the 39th, who came out in charge of a convict guard in 1826. On the other, four generations back, was Sergeant-Major Samuel Charles Sneyd of the 4th King's Own, who came out on the same duty in 1832, stayed to police the colony, and ended as its gaoler. Neither family needed a castle. Both of them, when the invented ancestry is taken away, turn out to have been doing the actual work of the place.

The Sneyds → · How far back it really goes →

Where he is not — and three Sneyds who are

The Blue Books are the colony's annual civil establishment list: every government officer, his office, his salary, the date of his present appointment and the date he first entered the public service. Sixty-four volumes are digitised. They were searched for Samuel Charles Sneyd, and he is not in them.

What the same search did find is that his family filled the Queensland public service after him — and the full run of volumes, 1870 to 1900, gives each man's career year by year. Thirty-seven unbroken years of Sneyds on the colony's payroll.

One caution on the Arthurs. The Queensland death index has an Arthur Sneyd, son of Samuel Sneyd, dying in 1896 — yet a Sneyd, Arthur is still drawing £200 in the Telegraph in 1899. Either the Blue Book is carrying a stale entry or, more likely, there are two Arthurs, the second being Arthur William Hartley Sneyd (1866–1922). The archive does not know which, and the table above should be read with that in mind. unresolved

He was buying Brisbane

The gaol governor's salary is not in the Blue Books, but his land is in the property register, and it shows a man of some substance in the new colony.