James Gough

The courthouse needed the roof replaced.
In February 1823 Ovens called for sealed tenders. Men tainted by association with Macquarie and Druitt had little hope of winning the contract. Stone and Lawless had to be paid in 1822 for the church and school at Campbelltown, but that was it for them. Adcock, once overseer of carpenters, showed in the first spill of tradesmen from the Lumber Yard how uninterested he was in construction; the person he chose was Martin Sheen, pianoforte maker. Adcock committed himself to the furniture business.

Who won the contract? His name was James Gough (Golf). Despite his life sentence and his youth, not yet half-way through his twenties, Gough was made an overseer of carpenters exactly fifteen weeks after his arrival in 1813. A trade learned and practised in Regency London impressed people in Sydney. Because of his talent he continued to be excused bad behaviour. He was gaoled in the colony for theft yet he regained his rank as overseer and on Australia Day 26th January 1821 received a conditional pardon.
The second term as overseer was spent in Parramatta New South Wales, and he retired into private practice as soon as he became free, so he avoided being dragged into Druitt\'s downfall the next year. Governor Brisbane, moreover, spent six nights out of seven in Parramatta, where Gough had worked on the roof of Government House. It was easy to confirm the carpenter\'s reputation for competence. It helped immensely that William Cox
of Richmond chose Gough and his team for his various projects in the Hawkesbury and in Sydney; both Macquarie and Brisbane trusted Cox\'s judgement on these matters above that of anyone else in the colony.

As happens today Gough probably assembled afresh a team for each of his contracts. We don\'t know the names of the free men who joined him, but convicts in his service are easier to trace. He hired two artisans from the Lumber Yard in 1822, John Wilson John Wilson like his master a London carpenter and about the same age, and George Metcalf, twenty years older, horse doctor and blacksmith from the Lake District. In the middle of 1823 Gough took over from a master the hiring fee of John Hartley a stoneworker from Lancashire, a labourer where roofs were concerned, but valuable for other commissions. And soon afterwards Gough picked up James Grimes, a woodworker from Lancashire, a poor choice it turned out because Gough was Grimes\' fourth employer in 1823 alone, and not his last.
Gough\'s men put up a framed and shingled truss roof without benefit of architect. Harris, who would have asked for a commission if he had been involved, courteously admired the result. Greenway, on the other hand, described it as \'fit for an old barn, and weighty enough to bear down walls less firmly built\'. D. D. Mathew, a rarely consulted architect, praised the carpentry but deplored the engineering. There were iron straps and bolts which, he believed, would hamper the timber\'s natural expansion and contraction as the weather changed; the tie beams should have been laid across the piers and not above the windows; the structure may well be too heavy for the brickwork beneath.
This last observation may have said as much about the brickwork as it did about the roof. Years later, after the ceilings fell in, a newspaper alleged that the pitch of the roof would have to be altered to relieve the pressure on the walls.

And there was still much left to do inside the building\'s shell.

Brisbane departed from Australia on the first day of December 1825. The managers vanished with him, an even more thorough change than had occurred at his advent. Institutional memory dimmed further. General Ralph Darling reached Sydney in mid-December, so the two governors did not meet. The chief engineer, Ovens, died ten days before Darling\'s landfall The current civil architect, George Cookney, whom even friends refused to consult, was dismissed a year minus three days after his appointment in April 1825; it was decided not to replace him.Frederick Goulburn, colonial secretary, chose not to sail in the same vessel as Brisbane, leaving in February 1826, just long enough to talk to his successor, Alexander McLeay.

Darling\'s intent was even blunter than Brisbane\'s and Goulburn\'s. He resolved that every convict should go straight from the ship to brute labour, for punishment and for shaming. Transported tradesmen should be dealt with most harshly of all, because they must naturally be sharper, slyer, more dangerous, than their less skilled fellows.

Darling\'s resolve began to crumble as soon as he passed through the Heads, although his contempt for convicts did not waver. He was appalled, as a soldier, by the pitiful harbourside fortifications; a single hostile frigate might lay waste the town. And his dismay deepened on the first night he spent ashore. Brisbane had lived at Parramatta, visiting Sydney for business on Tuesdays and sleeping in Sydney\'s Government House only if he could not get home in time. The neglected official residence leaked and rotted around its new occupants. \'The present House is a perfect Hovel\', Darling wrote. The new governor experienced the crisis in public works personally, and from the moment he entered Australia.

Where would the governor find adequate workmen? The Lumber Yard had been drained. Darling pestered London to sentence and send out as many tradesmen as possible, whom he would (like Macquarie) pluck straight from the ship into the Yard. Why? \'The government\', he decided. \'is necessarily obliged to retain the greater number of convict mechanics, in consequence of the work it has to perform, and there being no master tradesmen in the colony capable of undertaking a contract\'.

Was this true? There had once been contractors. James Gough, for one, continued to erect buildings in town and country, but he also looked for income from his pub on the road between Parramatta and Windsor and from the grazing paddocks beside the pub. Perhaps he spread himself too thinly, for he was to spend a few days in 1827 in prison for debt. The partnership of Stone and Lawless dissolved with the death of Stone in 1824. (106) Lawless diversified his interests, in ways similar to Gough. While still a convict he had sold meat to the commissariat store. After his pardon he ran cattle on land granted him near Goulburn and sold larger quantities of meat than before. His Pitt Street pub, reverently named the Governor Macquarie, became his base of operations a gathering place for racing men and a later generation of convicts and their overseers.

Citations:
APA style: Dyster, Barrie. (2007, June 1). Bungling a courthouse: a story of convict workplace reform The Free Library. (2007). Retrieved July 18, 2012 from http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Bungling a courthouse: a story of convict workplace reform.-a0166091772

Chicago style: Dyster, Barrie. 2007 Bungling a courthouse: a story of convict workplace reform The Free Library (June, 1), http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Bungling a courthouse: a story of convict workplace reform.-a0166091772 (accessed July 18 2012)

MLA style: Dyster, Barrie. \"Bungling a courthouse: a story of convict workplace reform\" The Free Library 01 June 2007. 18 July 2012